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Enragement equals engagement. If that's the world you want, good news, that's the world we have now. And the magic of AI and recommender systems has disrupted

Enragement equals engagement. If that's the world you want, good news, that's the world we have now. And the magic of AI and recommender systems has disrupted that old and stupid model of if "it bleeds it leads" to get you outraged faster and with far less effort than it used to take in the old and stupid days. But that's not the world I want to live in personally and if it takes some imperfect even sometimes ham-fisted regulation to get us to a better place I'm willing to deal with that rather than embrace the status quo because it sucks and it's just getting worse as the tools to hack social media have been democratized at scale. Ideally I'd love to let the free marketplace of ideas work this out (and it eventually will and I am a huge believer in weakly efficient marketplaces), but unless I get a 1000 plus year lifespan, I only have so many years left in my lightcone so I side with being more proactive.

verdverm 5y ago
Perhaps our generation must suffer during an evolutionarily difficult time so that we do not end up in 1984?
- varelse 5y ago
  Perhaps our generation must rely less on ridiculous hyperbole whose only benefit is to drive engagement and instead consider more compromise solutions to situations like this?
  - verdverm 5y ago
    What is given up in the compromise?
toomanyducks 5y ago
"The free marketplace of ideas" (and also classical liberalism) is hugely reliant on the idea of humans as rational agents (both the people selling and the people consuming). But when we're not, everything opens up to tons of propaganda (especially that from fascists who are more than willing to engage where leftists will reject premises). You can't have "enragement equals engagement" AND the "free" marketplace of ideas is good. The first is the natural consequence of the existence of the latter. If you take issue with the first, you should not accept the second either. As for what should replace that 'free' market, I honestly don't know. But deplatforming (not censoring, deplatforming) hate speech is a good place to start.
- varelse 5y ago
  Humans in my opinion and perhaps my opinion alone are ultimately rational agents prone to do the right thing but only after they've done all the wrong things. I don't have time for that here so I support experimenting with freedom of speech here and regulating obvious abuses of it like Facebook monetizing hatred and superstition. I don't know if I'm right or if I'm wrong here but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

verdverm 5y ago

Perhaps our generation must suffer during an evolutionarily difficult time so that we do not end up in 1984?

varelse 5y ago
Perhaps our generation must rely less on ridiculous hyperbole whose only benefit is to drive engagement and instead consider more compromise solutions to situations like this?
- verdverm 5y ago
  What is given up in the compromise?

toomanyducks 5y ago

"The free marketplace of ideas" (and also classical liberalism) is hugely reliant on the idea of humans as rational agents (both the people selling and the people consuming). But when we're not, everything opens up to tons of propaganda (especially that from fascists who are more than willing to engage where leftists will reject premises). You can't have "enragement equals engagement" AND the "free" marketplace of ideas is good. The first is the natural consequence of the existence of the latter. If you take issue with the first, you should not accept the second either. As for what should replace that 'free' market, I honestly don't know. But deplatforming (not censoring, deplatforming) hate speech is a good place to start.

varelse 5y ago
Humans in my opinion and perhaps my opinion alone are ultimately rational agents prone to do the right thing but only after they've done all the wrong things. I don't have time for that here so I support experimenting with freedom of speech here and regulating obvious abuses of it like Facebook monetizing hatred and superstition. I don't know if I'm right or if I'm wrong here but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.