8 ms·

I hate it as well, and if I could come up with some new way of advancing our species aside from free speech I would. I cannot and cannot see how such a thing wo

I hate it as well, and if I could come up with some new way of advancing our species aside from free speech I would. I cannot and cannot see how such a thing would ever be possible. Here's a bit of sunshine: the human species has not changed in thousands of years. We're still the same hairless monkeys we were back when people were thinking up all kinds of cool shit. Knowing this, it follows that 10% or so of the population are, well, nuts. Another 10% are so are willing to do anything to become famous. It has always been this way. (Of course, I'm just guessing the exact numbers) What's happened is that these folks are using this wonderful new instant worldwide publishing tool we've made to continue their pathologies. And companies are happy to make money letting them do so as long as nobody gets too upset. We are now reaching the point where lots of people are getting upset and those companies are running around like a single fireman in a city on fire trying to figure out how to make their business keep going. The good news is that we're still the same species as before, and we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society. The problem we have is that social media should not exist. It shouldn't be regulated, broken up, or any of that. It simply should not exist. The incentives here are not aligned with the survival of our species (There's a huge discussion of what to make instead. That's for another day) I think the problem is not easy to solve, but it's certainly easy to explain. It's not the end of civilization as we know it, at least it doesn't have to be.

rimliu 6y ago
You are right. Hardware hardly changed. However, one can argue, that software that we install into the new copies of hardware changed quite a bit. I think education and developing critical thinking skills should be the key to fixing those problems. Alas, the current trend is to try a way to get an education with as little effort as possible, which is destined to fail.
- ls65536 6y ago
  I really do think the hardware/software analogy here works quite well. In that sense, one could argue that the software has also become more complex, and perhaps more fragile, in recent times in order to better assist individuals in navigating this world. To your other point, I think that "education" and "critical thinking skills" are often conflated as one and the same, or that perhaps one necessarily leads to the other, but this is certainly not the case. While I think being educated to some degree is important in order to share a "common language" with others and to become a contributing member of society, the ability to think critically, and to act on it, is really necessary if we are to succeed and not fail catastrophically along the way. To go back to the analogy, having the ability to execute the software faithfully is one thing, but understanding when it might make sense to modify the software and how to do so responsibly given the fixed hardware we have available is really the critical piece.
plussed_reader 6y ago
Except for that extra artery that may be evolving in our arm... https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/humans-are-evolving-an-extra-artery-in-the-arm/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/humans-are-evolving-an-ext... Totally static for the last few millennia.
- lodovic 6y ago
  Don't forget about the "smartphone bone" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joa.12466 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joa.12466
darkerside 6y ago
> The incentives here are not aligned with the survival of our species It's a pretty far leap from that to saying something should not exist. But I'll bite. How are they not aligned, and why does it not merit existence?
- DanielBMarkham 6y ago
  Happy to engage you in another forum, which would probably be more productive. Ping me if you'd like to video chat. But it's a good question and I'll try to reply in a brief and somewhat hand-wavy way (due to the medium, space, etc) Everything I'm going to say has caveats. And I can't cover them all. Meh. If you believe that the species as a whole has never been this unstable before, then the real question is this: what has changed? Whatever it is, it's obviously happened in the last 20 years, maybe even in the last 7 or so. The thing to do would be to identify those changes and come up with a testable theory that can be tested using the data. In general, however, I am persuaded that the overall problem is that we've incentivized consumer technology based on a battle for attention span. This isn't new; it's been going on forever. But the network effect has shot it through the roof, and even simple AI is proving quite capable of taking that business model even further. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so much money in it. +If you accept that premise, then that's how the conversation should generally go. If you don't accept that premise, then we need to back up a bit and talk about the effects of technology in general. Here's a more detailed explanation and defense of my underlying thesis I published twelve years ago. This just didn't appear overnight; a lot of folks were trying to ring the warning bells earlier. (BTW, when I published it on HN, it got a lot of votes, but it also got a lot of "Well, sure, but 1) there'll be a new startup that will replace big tech soon, 2) we'll just invent some new app that will solve the problems we have from the current apps, etc") It was a sad demonstration of how all of us tech folk have a tendency to do the best we can to deny and ignore any implications of what we're doing aside from wondering whether our server is up. (I exaggerate for effect) http://tiny-giant-books.com/Entry1.html?EntryId=recgcpfuOFUesUpRy http://tiny-giant-books.com/Entry1.html?EntryId=recgcpfuOFUe... EDITED FOR CLARITY (Addition marked)
  - kortilla 6y ago
    Your thesis is based on the notion that “society is unstable” more than ever before. How are you measuring that? Despite tons of noise in social media, real life up has been incredibly stable for the last couple of decades in the west. The least amount of violence, lowest extreme poverty, highest disposable income, etc etc. In the 70s (before social media), there were multiple bombings every year in the US. That is completely unfathomable today. The headlines and discussions on social media today now heavily surround parsing Trumps words and arguing about how he’s racist and doing things wrong. Social media is just giving you the impression that things are unstable because people like to complain when by any standard long-term measure it’s just as stable as ever (barring recent economic instability caused by COVID). Some questions about the US? - when was the last time a prominent politician was assassinated? - when was the last time a government building was bombed? - when was the last time a prominent politician was assaulted and left in the hospital?
pjc50 6y ago
> we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society ... have we? Much of the 20th century was spent at war, with a death total somewhere in the region of a hundred million. As were most of the previous centuries. There have been isolated pockets where one might have a lifetime of stability over a wide area, but few of those were also "free". > The problem we have is that social media should not exist The challenge is to thread the needle between freedom degenerating into chaos and murder (Rohingya, etc) and total clampdown that also escalates into disappearances and murder.
- blub 6y ago
  Actually, if we could snap our fingers and wish social media out of existence tomorrow nothing really bad would happen, besides some influencers becoming poorer. The opposite of social media today (election manipulation, divided societies, ethnic cleansing) is the state of affairs before social media, which wasn't bad at all. I'm struggling to think of large-scale benefits social media has brought us, because the individual ones like talking more to grandma and getting more dates are clear enough. But come on, people should just pick up that phone and go out more.
  - 72deluxe 6y ago
    It is interesting that people were horrible or selfish or manipulative before the Internet, before the Web, and are horrible or selfish or manipulative AFTER widespread adoption of the Web and these "platforms". It's almost like arguing about the platforms is a side-point to the root cause of the problem - people's personalities and selfishness, and some people's gullibility without investigating "facts" presented to them. It's obvious that the Internet and social media wouldn't solve these issues with people, or hide these flaws in humanity. I am baffled why people think it would. It's just another form of something governments or institutions cannot handle/control, which has been occurring since written history began. The only difference is the sheer quantity and ease of having a voice these days. (For reference regarding my use of these "platforms": I use YouTube periodically to mainly watch the C++ conference videos to further highlight how out of touch I am with the modern iterations of the language, but have nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter since I found it to be a stream of people talking about themselves; by definition that is not a conversation, so is not social and should be renamed "Selfish Media" IMHO).
prawn 6y ago
The idea that a loony subset are now on the digital-loose reminds me of how someone once described the reputation of Chinese group tourists. They explained that it wasn't indicative of all Chinese, but more likely a recently upwardly-mobile lower-middle class with new money to travel. It was implied that these were the equivalent of Australian bogans or American rednecks (I guess). After all, Americans have had a particular reputation as travellers also, so perhaps went through the same phase?
TomSwirly 6y ago
> and we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society When was America ever "peaceful" or "progressive"? I lived there for thirty years and my ideas, boring and mainstream by European standards, were constantly considered "laughable", "naïve", "ignorant." Now I live in Europe again, where I again get all the things that Americans thought were laughable and impossible. In particular, America's been continuously at war for my whole life, and I'm no longer a young man. America's spent more money on weapons than the next ten countries put together. Calling America "peaceful" is totally false to the fact - it's obscene considering you've killed hundreds of thousands of completely innocent people in the last twenty years.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> it follows that 10% or so of the population are, well, nuts. Another 10% are so are willing to do anything to become famous. It has always been this way. Not sure that's true, though. Here's a cloud to cover your sunshine: what if the very concept that beliefs have to correspond to observable reality is a relatively new one, or a relatively unpopular one (with a 10% of the population subscribing to it)? What if it's an unchanging constant that people believe whatever works for them in the immediate, observable way? What if it's natural for people to believe in lies, if these lies don't seem to cause obvious, instant hurt to them, and especially if these lies benefits them socially (going along better with their tribe, finding their in-group, raising status)? I worry that for most of history, we could get away with believing in bullshit. And now we've scaled up and advanced our societies to the point they need accurate beliefs to function. Problem is, holding inaccurate beliefs doesn't usually hurt you in an immediately obvious ways, so our monkey brains don't connect the failures of our institutions with the bullshit individuals spread to each other.
- javajosh 6y ago
  Thank you for saying this. It takes the discussion in a different, but I think more useful, direction. Suffering is caused when you believe something that isn't true, and the rational idealists don't want to accept "it's natural for people to believe in lies", as you say. (There is a juicy irony here, which I will leave as an exercise for the reader.) The key innovation we require, as a society, are better feedback mechanisms to correct inaccurate beliefs. This means more frequent, but smaller, pain in response to mistakes. To those who object, the alternative isn't no pain, but rather, the catastrophic pain of collapse. Society is really a collection of institutions, and somehow in all institutions, loyalty has usurped principle, and accountability fails because the accuser is shunned, hated, feared. So, institution by institution, we weaken. The solution, for example in academia, is to shun (fire, blacklist, etc) those "researchers" who cheat, lie, and distort their findings. In the justice system, lawyers, police, and judges who break the rules should be punished more, not less, severely than the rest of us. Again, these are not changes born of malice, or a desire to see more suffering, but rather a price we must accept to maintain healthy institutions with high standards, and so, prevent societal collapse. In some ways I think "cancel culture" is a reaction to this lack of accountability, as an attempt to replace it, to ape it, almost like a cargo cult. Of course, there are huge problems with this, not the least of which there is not an institution behind it, but rather just mob rule that answers to no-one, not even itself.
zaarn 6y ago
We aren't the same at all. In the last 10'000 years, we developed lactose tolerance, enabling us to herd cows for more than just meat. Only about 200 years ago, the first people with three arteries instead of two in their arms are showing up and recent studies seem to indicate that wisdom teeth are evolving away. The evolution of a species never stops, even if it gets a bit slow. And our brains may have changed in the last 10'000 years too. Possibly even in the last 200.
- amanaplanacanal 6y ago
  How far could a new mutation have spread in the last 200 years though? Not far.
  - zaarn 6y ago
    According to newspapers, about 30% of people born 20th century have this mutation.
meragrin_ 6y ago
> The problem we have is that social media should not exist. So you are saying we should just get rid of the internet? Social media is not just a few popular sites. It is the entirety of the internet. You get rid of the "social media" sites and people will still connect. Crap will still flow. You'll obviously see a temporary drop until people adjust and reconnect. The internet is about connecting people and making the exchange of information easier. You cannot get rid of "social media" without getting rid of the internet.

rimliu 6y ago

You are right. Hardware hardly changed. However, one can argue, that software that we install into the new copies of hardware changed quite a bit. I think education and developing critical thinking skills should be the key to fixing those problems. Alas, the current trend is to try a way to get an education with as little effort as possible, which is destined to fail.

ls65536 6y ago
I really do think the hardware/software analogy here works quite well. In that sense, one could argue that the software has also become more complex, and perhaps more fragile, in recent times in order to better assist individuals in navigating this world. To your other point, I think that "education" and "critical thinking skills" are often conflated as one and the same, or that perhaps one necessarily leads to the other, but this is certainly not the case. While I think being educated to some degree is important in order to share a "common language" with others and to become a contributing member of society, the ability to think critically, and to act on it, is really necessary if we are to succeed and not fail catastrophically along the way. To go back to the analogy, having the ability to execute the software faithfully is one thing, but understanding when it might make sense to modify the software and how to do so responsibly given the fixed hardware we have available is really the critical piece.

plussed_reader 6y ago

Except for that extra artery that may be evolving in our arm... https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/humans-are-evolving-an-extra-artery-in-the-arm/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/humans-are-evolving-an-ext... Totally static for the last few millennia.

lodovic 6y ago
Don't forget about the "smartphone bone" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joa.12466 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/joa.12466

darkerside 6y ago

> The incentives here are not aligned with the survival of our species It's a pretty far leap from that to saying something should not exist. But I'll bite. How are they not aligned, and why does it not merit existence?

DanielBMarkham 6y ago
Happy to engage you in another forum, which would probably be more productive. Ping me if you'd like to video chat. But it's a good question and I'll try to reply in a brief and somewhat hand-wavy way (due to the medium, space, etc) Everything I'm going to say has caveats. And I can't cover them all. Meh. If you believe that the species as a whole has never been this unstable before, then the real question is this: what has changed? Whatever it is, it's obviously happened in the last 20 years, maybe even in the last 7 or so. The thing to do would be to identify those changes and come up with a testable theory that can be tested using the data. In general, however, I am persuaded that the overall problem is that we've incentivized consumer technology based on a battle for attention span. This isn't new; it's been going on forever. But the network effect has shot it through the roof, and even simple AI is proving quite capable of taking that business model even further. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so much money in it. +If you accept that premise, then that's how the conversation should generally go. If you don't accept that premise, then we need to back up a bit and talk about the effects of technology in general. Here's a more detailed explanation and defense of my underlying thesis I published twelve years ago. This just didn't appear overnight; a lot of folks were trying to ring the warning bells earlier. (BTW, when I published it on HN, it got a lot of votes, but it also got a lot of "Well, sure, but 1) there'll be a new startup that will replace big tech soon, 2) we'll just invent some new app that will solve the problems we have from the current apps, etc") It was a sad demonstration of how all of us tech folk have a tendency to do the best we can to deny and ignore any implications of what we're doing aside from wondering whether our server is up. (I exaggerate for effect) http://tiny-giant-books.com/Entry1.html?EntryId=recgcpfuOFUesUpRy http://tiny-giant-books.com/Entry1.html?EntryId=recgcpfuOFUe... EDITED FOR CLARITY (Addition marked)
- kortilla 6y ago
  Your thesis is based on the notion that “society is unstable” more than ever before. How are you measuring that? Despite tons of noise in social media, real life up has been incredibly stable for the last couple of decades in the west. The least amount of violence, lowest extreme poverty, highest disposable income, etc etc. In the 70s (before social media), there were multiple bombings every year in the US. That is completely unfathomable today. The headlines and discussions on social media today now heavily surround parsing Trumps words and arguing about how he’s racist and doing things wrong. Social media is just giving you the impression that things are unstable because people like to complain when by any standard long-term measure it’s just as stable as ever (barring recent economic instability caused by COVID). Some questions about the US? - when was the last time a prominent politician was assassinated? - when was the last time a government building was bombed? - when was the last time a prominent politician was assaulted and left in the hospital?

pjc50 6y ago

> we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society ... have we? Much of the 20th century was spent at war, with a death total somewhere in the region of a hundred million. As were most of the previous centuries. There have been isolated pockets where one might have a lifetime of stability over a wide area, but few of those were also "free". > The problem we have is that social media should not exist The challenge is to thread the needle between freedom degenerating into chaos and murder (Rohingya, etc) and total clampdown that also escalates into disappearances and murder.

blub 6y ago
Actually, if we could snap our fingers and wish social media out of existence tomorrow nothing really bad would happen, besides some influencers becoming poorer. The opposite of social media today (election manipulation, divided societies, ethnic cleansing) is the state of affairs before social media, which wasn't bad at all. I'm struggling to think of large-scale benefits social media has brought us, because the individual ones like talking more to grandma and getting more dates are clear enough. But come on, people should just pick up that phone and go out more.
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  It is interesting that people were horrible or selfish or manipulative before the Internet, before the Web, and are horrible or selfish or manipulative AFTER widespread adoption of the Web and these "platforms". It's almost like arguing about the platforms is a side-point to the root cause of the problem - people's personalities and selfishness, and some people's gullibility without investigating "facts" presented to them. It's obvious that the Internet and social media wouldn't solve these issues with people, or hide these flaws in humanity. I am baffled why people think it would. It's just another form of something governments or institutions cannot handle/control, which has been occurring since written history began. The only difference is the sheer quantity and ease of having a voice these days. (For reference regarding my use of these "platforms": I use YouTube periodically to mainly watch the C++ conference videos to further highlight how out of touch I am with the modern iterations of the language, but have nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter since I found it to be a stream of people talking about themselves; by definition that is not a conversation, so is not social and should be renamed "Selfish Media" IMHO).

prawn 6y ago

The idea that a loony subset are now on the digital-loose reminds me of how someone once described the reputation of Chinese group tourists. They explained that it wasn't indicative of all Chinese, but more likely a recently upwardly-mobile lower-middle class with new money to travel. It was implied that these were the equivalent of Australian bogans or American rednecks (I guess). After all, Americans have had a particular reputation as travellers also, so perhaps went through the same phase?

TomSwirly 6y ago

> and we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society When was America ever "peaceful" or "progressive"? I lived there for thirty years and my ideas, boring and mainstream by European standards, were constantly considered "laughable", "naïve", "ignorant." Now I live in Europe again, where I again get all the things that Americans thought were laughable and impossible. In particular, America's been continuously at war for my whole life, and I'm no longer a young man. America's spent more money on weapons than the next ten countries put together. Calling America "peaceful" is totally false to the fact - it's obscene considering you've killed hundreds of thousands of completely innocent people in the last twenty years.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> it follows that 10% or so of the population are, well, nuts. Another 10% are so are willing to do anything to become famous. It has always been this way. Not sure that's true, though. Here's a cloud to cover your sunshine: what if the very concept that beliefs have to correspond to observable reality is a relatively new one, or a relatively unpopular one (with a 10% of the population subscribing to it)? What if it's an unchanging constant that people believe whatever works for them in the immediate, observable way? What if it's natural for people to believe in lies, if these lies don't seem to cause obvious, instant hurt to them, and especially if these lies benefits them socially (going along better with their tribe, finding their in-group, raising status)? I worry that for most of history, we could get away with believing in bullshit. And now we've scaled up and advanced our societies to the point they need accurate beliefs to function. Problem is, holding inaccurate beliefs doesn't usually hurt you in an immediately obvious ways, so our monkey brains don't connect the failures of our institutions with the bullshit individuals spread to each other.

javajosh 6y ago
Thank you for saying this. It takes the discussion in a different, but I think more useful, direction. Suffering is caused when you believe something that isn't true, and the rational idealists don't want to accept "it's natural for people to believe in lies", as you say. (There is a juicy irony here, which I will leave as an exercise for the reader.) The key innovation we require, as a society, are better feedback mechanisms to correct inaccurate beliefs. This means more frequent, but smaller, pain in response to mistakes. To those who object, the alternative isn't no pain, but rather, the catastrophic pain of collapse. Society is really a collection of institutions, and somehow in all institutions, loyalty has usurped principle, and accountability fails because the accuser is shunned, hated, feared. So, institution by institution, we weaken. The solution, for example in academia, is to shun (fire, blacklist, etc) those "researchers" who cheat, lie, and distort their findings. In the justice system, lawyers, police, and judges who break the rules should be punished more, not less, severely than the rest of us. Again, these are not changes born of malice, or a desire to see more suffering, but rather a price we must accept to maintain healthy institutions with high standards, and so, prevent societal collapse. In some ways I think "cancel culture" is a reaction to this lack of accountability, as an attempt to replace it, to ape it, almost like a cargo cult. Of course, there are huge problems with this, not the least of which there is not an institution behind it, but rather just mob rule that answers to no-one, not even itself.

zaarn 6y ago

We aren't the same at all. In the last 10'000 years, we developed lactose tolerance, enabling us to herd cows for more than just meat. Only about 200 years ago, the first people with three arteries instead of two in their arms are showing up and recent studies seem to indicate that wisdom teeth are evolving away. The evolution of a species never stops, even if it gets a bit slow. And our brains may have changed in the last 10'000 years too. Possibly even in the last 200.

amanaplanacanal 6y ago
How far could a new mutation have spread in the last 200 years though? Not far.
- zaarn 6y ago
  According to newspapers, about 30% of people born 20th century have this mutation.

meragrin_ 6y ago

> The problem we have is that social media should not exist. So you are saying we should just get rid of the internet? Social media is not just a few popular sites. It is the entirety of the internet. You get rid of the "social media" sites and people will still connect. Crap will still flow. You'll obviously see a temporary drop until people adjust and reconnect. The internet is about connecting people and making the exchange of information easier. You cannot get rid of "social media" without getting rid of the internet.