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We are letting the most pathological idiots — incels, femcels, masculinity grifters, misogynists and misandrists, trolls — shape a whole generation’s views on g
by api 2y ago
We are letting the most pathological idiots — incels, femcels, masculinity grifters, misogynists and misandrists, trolls — shape a whole generation’s views on gender dynamics and relationships.
Of course I guess it’s like other fields. Antivaxxers and people who think you can cure cancer with a juice cleanse lead health discourse. Conspiritainment grifters and unhinged fanatics shape politics.
Why?
This needs to be etched somewhere on a giant stone monument: trash maximizes engagement.
If you optimize any media for maximum engagement by the maximum number of people, you get trash. Two people walk past you on the street. One says “hi,” and the other smears themselves with peanut butter and clucks like a chicken. Which one maximizes engagement?
Edit: I forgot porn. That’s a factor too and another way to maximize engagement that gives people ridiculous unrealistic views on sex.
This has always been true. It’s why “yellow journalism” was a term and why tabloids have always existed and why so much TV was always trash. But we’ve gotten so good at it with personalized feeds and algorithms that it’s become far too addictive and powerful. It’s becoming reality for too many people. This is an existential risk to our civilization at this point.
Banning TikTok is a start. Now do all the other ones.
- Schiendelman 2y agoDefine "letting". This seems to me to be the same pattern as every other new communication medium. Sure, it's more addictive now. Do you think playing whack a mole with the definition of addictive will solve that problem? I don't. I think the only way to get the outcome of "people less addicted to media and dumb ideas" is to make addiction uncool - and government can't do that. People are doing the social changes naturally already. Lots of people are off social media. People are quitting alcohol too, and porn. Those people will be more successful in life, and more likely to reproduce. This seems like a nothingburger for an onlooker.
- api 2y agoI'm not as optimistic about people learning, and addiction has never gone away. I used to be more of a libertarian about things like financial regulation, but what changed my mind was watching markets and especially things like the cryptocurrency phenomenon where you really did have deregulation. All you get is scams because people keep falling for the same nonsense over and over again. None of it is new. Ponzi schemes, bubbles, gambling, rug pulls, wildcat banking, all of it is hundreds of years old or more, but it keeps working because every generation falls for it anew because dopamine. I think you'd have to re-architect the human dopamine system in very deep ways if you wanted to change this. We are very easy to hack.
- Schiendelman 2y agoI'm not saying we can fix addiction. I'm saying we shouldn't try to regulate this away, we won't have any real impact.