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Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. But also decades of materialism and "me me me" culture: I think people learn to follow t

Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. But also decades of materialism and "me me me" culture: I think people learn to follow their desires no-matter-what when buying goods or services and the same emotional mechanism is transferred into "buying in" an idea. Modern advertising and branding is based on emotion and vague ideas. The same algorithms to target online ads have been used to influence politics (see cambridge analytica). > stances that lay outside dogmatic groupthink Yes, but with a caveat: an idea can be labeled "groupthink" and "too political" as a tactic to dismiss it easily.

sangnoir 5y ago
> Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. Way before social media, there was short wave radio, then cable news which introduced the 24-hour news cycle, and entertainment-shows-disguised-as-news with their permanently outraged talking heads (think Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson). Political polarization is older than social media, and it wasn't emergent - it was a deliberate political tactic and it worked well enough until the other side adopted it too. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma and both sides are now locked into a cycle of defecting - doing otherwise makes no sense, and there aren't many deescalation off-ramps.
- ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
  > Political polarization is older than social media Yes, it was widely reported in debates in ancient Athens and the Roman empire. But I wrote "Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking.", which is different. Humanity has never seen before a billion-dollar industry generating user engagement by fueling online altercation. Instant gratification, dopamine cycle addiction and all of that.
  - scruple 5y ago
    Maybe there should be IRB-style oversight for Twitter, etc..., to tweak their algorithms. They are, after all, experimenting on humans here.
    - Nasrudith 5y ago
      Literally any change would count as "an experiment". Not just for algorithims but for "do people like to buy this new product". Saying there should be limited changes of algorithms is a popular "hot take" but it fundamentally doesn't make any goddamned sense. Human experiments being activities defined by the subject instead of the object make more sense. Can you have the human-involved experiment with just the objects occur naturally? You cannot just leave the props lying around a college campus and get a Milgram's experiment replication attempt. You cannot just have a freezing chamber or scalpels to repeat the horrors of nazi Germany and Unit 731.
lucasverra 5y ago
> Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. Plug as a founder: We are trying to balance things out on Polemix.co (invite code LV005) Launched 6 weeks ago, we bring together people from both sides of hot questions. The format is inspired from TikTok and consists of 30-second videos in which speakers answer YES or NO to controversial questions. The app’s goal is to break echo chambers. If you are passionate about exchange of ideas, please shoot me your thoughts to feedback@polemix.co to have your view on social media outrage.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  How does only allowing yes or no answers increase nuance?
  - bigwavedave 5y ago
    > How does only allowing yes or no answers increase nuance? I don't know. It says they're 30-second videos- I imagine it'll consist of people prefacing their answer with "yes" or "no" followed by 30 seconds to elaborate. However, I think this will have the same problem that makes Twitter so unpopular with HN's crowd; Twitter is far too limiting in the length of a single tweet, so all that gets shouted out into the aether is an emotionally-triggering soundbite. That's a key part of what fosters such an echo chamber. It kills discussion and all you end up with are some very loud, angry tweets with no context or nuance. I have no idea how Polemix plans on bringing more nuance to the political scene this way, but that's probably why I'm still a lowly non-founder/non-FAANG dev. I don't like to be negative or disparaging, but in my limited vision, this sounds like the love child of Twitter and Vine.
  - lucasverra 5y ago
    Because everyone gets to see a Yes followed than a No video. Also, besides the classical "like button", there is a Respect button that signals that you are willing to open the door to the other side. Hence, the nuancing and approaching instead of flame wars
    - 5y ago
hilbert42 5y ago
"Modern advertising and branding is based on emotion and vague ideas. The same algorithms to target online ads have been used to influence politics (see cambridge analytica)." You're right, advertising and branding is, as you say, based on harnessing one's emotions, however an integral part of that process is also involved in converting those initial 'vague ideas'/notions into a solid worldview and it's this newly-developed worldview that causes its recipient/owner to actually believe in or act upon the idea. In essence, this is the basis of all propaganda; and, as we all know, in its most extreme forms it's both pernicious and very dangerous. Probably the best—and certainly the most infamous—explanation of how one's worldview can be changed by carefully planned propaganda comes from a 1928 speech titled Knowledge and Propaganda. Tragically, this succinct and simple to understand speech comes from one of the most notorious and despicable persons of the 20th Century, and we only have to look to history to see how devastatingly effective the contents of this short message turned out to be: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb54.htm https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb54.... Naturally, the advertising industry would want to dissociate itself from this document as much as is absolutely possible but I'd bet many dollars to a brick that many in the advertising industry have read it secretly and understand its message extremely well. Why? Because it has form—when actually implemented its message turned out to be so overwhelmingly effective. In a free market capitalist economy, advertising is seen and considered as being beneficial, and at one end of the spectrum, it probably is, but as we've seen recently, at the other end it can morph into dangerous propaganda—and, unfortunately, there is no clear demarcation point to separate the two. Given the fact that trillions of dollars are now tied up in advertising, and that serious things have been done in its name (Cambridge Analytica and those other recent assaults on democracy), I reckon it's now time that we stopped pretending that advertising and propaganda are separate entities when clearly they are not. In my opinion, if we viewed them as both one and the same entity and then set rules accordingly, then we would have some hope of making progress.

sangnoir 5y ago

> Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. Way before social media, there was short wave radio, then cable news which introduced the 24-hour news cycle, and entertainment-shows-disguised-as-news with their permanently outraged talking heads (think Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson). Political polarization is older than social media, and it wasn't emergent - it was a deliberate political tactic and it worked well enough until the other side adopted it too. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma and both sides are now locked into a cycle of defecting - doing otherwise makes no sense, and there aren't many deescalation off-ramps.

ex_amazon_sde 5y ago
> Political polarization is older than social media Yes, it was widely reported in debates in ancient Athens and the Roman empire. But I wrote "Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking.", which is different. Humanity has never seen before a billion-dollar industry generating user engagement by fueling online altercation. Instant gratification, dopamine cycle addiction and all of that.
- scruple 5y ago
  Maybe there should be IRB-style oversight for Twitter, etc..., to tweak their algorithms. They are, after all, experimenting on humans here.
  - Nasrudith 5y ago
    Literally any change would count as "an experiment". Not just for algorithims but for "do people like to buy this new product". Saying there should be limited changes of algorithms is a popular "hot take" but it fundamentally doesn't make any goddamned sense. Human experiments being activities defined by the subject instead of the object make more sense. Can you have the human-involved experiment with just the objects occur naturally? You cannot just leave the props lying around a college campus and get a Milgram's experiment replication attempt. You cannot just have a freezing chamber or scalpels to repeat the horrors of nazi Germany and Unit 731.

lucasverra 5y ago

> Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. Plug as a founder: We are trying to balance things out on Polemix.co (invite code LV005) Launched 6 weeks ago, we bring together people from both sides of hot questions. The format is inspired from TikTok and consists of 30-second videos in which speakers answer YES or NO to controversial questions. The app’s goal is to break echo chambers. If you are passionate about exchange of ideas, please shoot me your thoughts to feedback@polemix.co to have your view on social media outrage.

beaconstudios 5y ago
How does only allowing yes or no answers increase nuance?
- bigwavedave 5y ago
  > How does only allowing yes or no answers increase nuance? I don't know. It says they're 30-second videos- I imagine it'll consist of people prefacing their answer with "yes" or "no" followed by 30 seconds to elaborate. However, I think this will have the same problem that makes Twitter so unpopular with HN's crowd; Twitter is far too limiting in the length of a single tweet, so all that gets shouted out into the aether is an emotionally-triggering soundbite. That's a key part of what fosters such an echo chamber. It kills discussion and all you end up with are some very loud, angry tweets with no context or nuance. I have no idea how Polemix plans on bringing more nuance to the political scene this way, but that's probably why I'm still a lowly non-founder/non-FAANG dev. I don't like to be negative or disparaging, but in my limited vision, this sounds like the love child of Twitter and Vine.
- lucasverra 5y ago
  Because everyone gets to see a Yes followed than a No video. Also, besides the classical "like button", there is a Respect button that signals that you are willing to open the door to the other side. Hence, the nuancing and approaching instead of flame wars
  - 5y ago

hilbert42 5y ago

"Modern advertising and branding is based on emotion and vague ideas. The same algorithms to target online ads have been used to influence politics (see cambridge analytica)." You're right, advertising and branding is, as you say, based on harnessing one's emotions, however an integral part of that process is also involved in converting those initial 'vague ideas'/notions into a solid worldview and it's this newly-developed worldview that causes its recipient/owner to actually believe in or act upon the idea. In essence, this is the basis of all propaganda; and, as we all know, in its most extreme forms it's both pernicious and very dangerous. Probably the best—and certainly the most infamous—explanation of how one's worldview can be changed by carefully planned propaganda comes from a 1928 speech titled Knowledge and Propaganda. Tragically, this succinct and simple to understand speech comes from one of the most notorious and despicable persons of the 20th Century, and we only have to look to history to see how devastatingly effective the contents of this short message turned out to be: https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb54.htm https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb54.... Naturally, the advertising industry would want to dissociate itself from this document as much as is absolutely possible but I'd bet many dollars to a brick that many in the advertising industry have read it secretly and understand its message extremely well. Why? Because it has form—when actually implemented its message turned out to be so overwhelmingly effective. In a free market capitalist economy, advertising is seen and considered as being beneficial, and at one end of the spectrum, it probably is, but as we've seen recently, at the other end it can morph into dangerous propaganda—and, unfortunately, there is no clear demarcation point to separate the two. Given the fact that trillions of dollars are now tied up in advertising, and that serious things have been done in its name (Cambridge Analytica and those other recent assaults on democracy), I reckon it's now time that we stopped pretending that advertising and propaganda are separate entities when clearly they are not. In my opinion, if we viewed them as both one and the same entity and then set rules accordingly, then we would have some hope of making progress.