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> Facts and transparency are the intended pillars of the modern First Amendment I don’t think we can ascribe intentions that easily. Speech is also the way peo

> Facts and transparency are the intended pillars of the modern First Amendment I don’t think we can ascribe intentions that easily. Speech is also the way people process their emotions, clarify their thoughts, get into dialogue with other people and form a dialectic to discover the truth. If people can’t fight their with words, they will fight with their swords, because they will lose hope of integrating their world-view with others. I am also bothered the word facts getting thrown out that easily. We are all exploring an infinite problem space with limited knowledge and processing power we have. This has 2 consequences a) no one can have the epistemological monopoly on truth and b) one could definitely deceive themselves and others with factual information that otherwise doesn’t give the complete picture. Which means, there is no terminal place for reality, and we always need to be in the process of integrating new data, including the perspective of others. Author bends over backwards to ultimately manufacture consent for censorship, but the problem has never been about misinformation. It is not even about the volume of content to sift true with new media. It is the new platforms themselves with their perverse incentinves. When we read twitter, we think we are interacting with people. But just like fish not seeing the water, we don’t see the medium, and the fact that the largest entity we are interacting with is the AI that keeps curating the content we see for one and only goal: engagement. Behind the curtains, the biggest applied psychology experiment is being run by the best paid PhDs of the world; your every interaction is processed through the lens of every single heuristic you have and their failure modes (fallacies, biases) are exploited in the name of engagement. The result is of course we going crazy, because no one, not even the most self-disciplined stoic, can defend against prolonged exposure to this machine and preserve their rationality. So to assume the answer to this madness is to restrict speech is not only futile but also harmful. It is empowering the filtering role these platforms play, and will definitely drive us crazier. Instead I propose this solution; marketplace of ideas now has to incorporate the marketplace for AIs that curate those ideas to be complete. Make it mandatory for any sufficiently large content curator to have alternative recommendation engines users can pick from. Then watch people chosing ones that doesn’t make them enraged at the expense of engagement, that rewards curious, honest intellectual discourse, that doesn’t reward impulsivity etc. Those recommendation engines are the hidden parties in our speech, constantly whispering “have you heard so and so said this” and carrying around the most enraging but engaging stuff, because it can make a few cents showing you ads everytime you let it speak. We need to make and pick ones that has the best interest of people in mind, not just shareholders’.

betwixthewires 6y ago
> Instead I propose this solution; marketplace of ideas now has to incorporate the marketplace for AIs that curate those ideas to be complete. I don't know about this. Interesting proposal. I don't normally take a cynical view, but humans are emotional creatures, otherwise these dishonest mechanisms of generating engagement wouldn't work. In such a system it is likely that the most emotionally motivating algorithms would win. Beyond that, why does one company need to make multiple algorithms? Why do we need a law to enforce this? Why don't we just have any company able to make any product they like and let people decide? We have that now of course. And the problem I laid out with this is plainly obvious on the internet today. People are picking the algorithm that generates in them the most emotional reaction. But I suggest that these algorithms fail in the marketplace by a different mechanism: they inevitably lead to the state we are in now, where people become disillusioned with the control of information flow (and other problems associated with the curation algorithms), and people move to other websites with other algorithms. In the past couple of years we have seen an explosion of alternatives, some echo chambers, some failed but genuine attempts, some sizeable competitors, some in the pipe. There is a large and fast growing diaspora from the big websites. Essentially what I'm saying is, what you want is happening now without any intervention, and everything is as it should be.
- acituan 6y ago
  > Beyond that, why does one company need to make multiple algorithms? Why do we need a law to enforce this? I meant they are enforced to open their content for licensing. The market we have today is for services that are actually a bundle of things; youtube is both a video infrastructure and a recommendation engine. Twitter is both an infrastructure for textual content, for a network of people and a recommendation engine based on both. It is hard to say if they are chosen for their recommendation engines or their content/network. The latter is very prone for monopolistic dynamics, the former is being victims of that power law distribution in my opinion. I don't want to be as engaged as possible with twitter, but twitter does. If the new "virtuous-recommendation-engine" promised they are not there for maximum money but maximum wellbeing and sensemaking of their users, I might switch to that, ask my relatives to switch to that, force my kids to switch to that.

betwixthewires 6y ago

> Instead I propose this solution; marketplace of ideas now has to incorporate the marketplace for AIs that curate those ideas to be complete. I don't know about this. Interesting proposal. I don't normally take a cynical view, but humans are emotional creatures, otherwise these dishonest mechanisms of generating engagement wouldn't work. In such a system it is likely that the most emotionally motivating algorithms would win. Beyond that, why does one company need to make multiple algorithms? Why do we need a law to enforce this? Why don't we just have any company able to make any product they like and let people decide? We have that now of course. And the problem I laid out with this is plainly obvious on the internet today. People are picking the algorithm that generates in them the most emotional reaction. But I suggest that these algorithms fail in the marketplace by a different mechanism: they inevitably lead to the state we are in now, where people become disillusioned with the control of information flow (and other problems associated with the curation algorithms), and people move to other websites with other algorithms. In the past couple of years we have seen an explosion of alternatives, some echo chambers, some failed but genuine attempts, some sizeable competitors, some in the pipe. There is a large and fast growing diaspora from the big websites. Essentially what I'm saying is, what you want is happening now without any intervention, and everything is as it should be.

acituan 6y ago
> Beyond that, why does one company need to make multiple algorithms? Why do we need a law to enforce this? I meant they are enforced to open their content for licensing. The market we have today is for services that are actually a bundle of things; youtube is both a video infrastructure and a recommendation engine. Twitter is both an infrastructure for textual content, for a network of people and a recommendation engine based on both. It is hard to say if they are chosen for their recommendation engines or their content/network. The latter is very prone for monopolistic dynamics, the former is being victims of that power law distribution in my opinion. I don't want to be as engaged as possible with twitter, but twitter does. If the new "virtuous-recommendation-engine" promised they are not there for maximum money but maximum wellbeing and sensemaking of their users, I might switch to that, ask my relatives to switch to that, force my kids to switch to that.