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Nice. Upvoted by me, because that's an interesting word I haven't seen before, it's interesting to see people argue for and against it, and I think your point
by jlokier 6y ago
Nice. Upvoted by me, because that's an interesting word I haven't seen before, it's interesting to see people argue for and against it, and I think your point of view is a reasonable thing to argue for even though I think it's weakly argued because it doesn't appear to weigh up consequences of alternatives.
Put in eumemics terms, the argument I've presented in this subthread is that you can't avoid it, you can only pretend to avoid it and/or decide not to be deliberate about it, thereby having the effect of eumemics anyway but with different parameters.
That might be the better decision, to commit to not being one of the actors significantly influencing global dialogue, but there's no point pretending it isn't a decision or that it doesn't have consequences, or that the outcome is neutral, or that the outcome is what most people actually want. (Or that it isn't a paradox.)
One way or another there are powerful actors in the system, and if there weren't it would create them. I suppose if you commit to the underlying principle of respect for people in a democratic manner, you might want to be neutral about which consequences "the people" can pursue, for example if they want war than war it is, if they want peace then peace it is. However by and large what most people say they want at large, and what they actually get as a result of their actions, are quite disconnected due to very complex chains of consequences. This is well known and people complain about it all the time.
As a result, even if trying to be neutral and respectful towards all people with regard to what the people want, it is not clear (to me anyway) that neutral communications platforms lead to what people actually want (collectively, democratically) any better than non-neutral platforms. Perheps we should build things that are designed to find out what people actually want, in a robust and evolvable manner (collectively, democratically) and choose the biases that then provide it.
A well known example is moderation: Unmoderated platforms end up causing many people to leave them or to avoid speaking up, with the result that any unmoderated platform is dominated by highly unrepresentative viewpoints of the collective of people.
Moderated platforms are accused of censorship, "view-promoting" platforms are accused of censorship in your meaning of it (as long term bias), yet unmoderated and un-promoting platforms are also censorship by that meaning because they also quiet so many voices in a systematically biased fashion. There is simply no escape from this dilemma and no honesty in pretending it doesn't exist.