7 ms·

Scapegoating the Algorithm

47 points by fmblwntr 1y ago

walterbell 1y ago
Author is Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/about https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/about > Our research is dedicated to ensuring AI is a force for good and it’s structured in a series of research programmes that cover a wide range of projects. Our work explores vital questions about the risks and opportunities emerging with AI in the near, mid- and long-term. These range from algorithmic transparency and the nature of intelligence to automated warfare, consciousness, social AI, feminist AI, AI-amplified injustice, global and pluriversal design, and the implications of AI for democracy, geopolitics, and the natural environment.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- tpdly 1y ago
  Thanks for the context. The meat of their argument, in my opinion, relies on this: > Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the balance of empirical evidence in this area does not support the claim that social media use has a large impact on users’ political attitudes and behavior. One such study they provide as a strong representative of the empirical evidence was by researchers collaborating with Meta where they did an RCT to test whether reverse-chronological vs ml algorithm feeds resulted int different political beliefs. I haven't looked into the study, but on its face that's an insanely stupid design; if my youtube feed became only reverse chronological one day I'd just open a different app after 40 seconds. Content platforms' main product is their behavior-modulating feeds, their ability to hold your eyes for 4 hours a day. The idea that this wouldn't be effecting our politics is insane.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jsrozner 1y ago
Ugh, this fellow misses the forest for the trees. Though he's partially right: social media is partially an extension of past trends. See, e.g., "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Postman. But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in arguably corrupt behavior as long as benefits outweigh costs. Google, by pioneering an internet based on advertising, shifted the allocation of the collective Internet-capital toward producing content that is engaging. You tell me if engagement correlates with truthfulness or long term utility (it doesn't). Google -- though yes initially useful and even utility-generating -- would ultimately extract all the useful latent value (including any surplus it had added) from the internet. We are left with a very high entropy internet, where you are far more likely to find factually incorrect or simply worthless content (noise) than useful content (signal). (Though, yes, bastions of order do still exist, like wikipedia.) Social media (facebook) simply did the same but instead of the broad internet, focused on extraction of value from interpersonal relationships. The result there, too, has not been good. So is the internet / social media different? Yes and no. The degree of concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and general capacity to shape the world is much greater in these companies. Whatever trends existed previously have been substantially accelerated. These companies have means to influence nearly every aspect of life. That is not something that magazines, radio, nor (untargeted) television could accomplish. Moreover, given their substantial power, companies like Goog and FB are more capable of altering the fabric of values that might otherwise have resisted change; i.e., they have accelerated the decline of institutions that would have otherwise favored truth, community, etc. America's "large scale epistemic challenges" are exactly that: our society and institutions are increasingly devoid of concern for what truth is. There aren't "right" answers to every problem, but to have a debate, there has to be some set of values against which to measure consequences, and good faith commitment to a framework to measure. That's a notion of "truth", and we have mostly lost that. Social media makes zero epistemic commitments, except whether a marginal dollar is earned. Though it is not the only problem, if your society were overrun by drug dealers turning people into mindless zombies, you might realize that it's hard to fix anything until you expel the drug dealers. This author -- at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence -- likely wants to use algorithms for democracy; i.e., his group has the new miracle pill to fix your ill.
bee_rider 1y ago
I dunno. Things seem a lot dumber since social media, but I guess it is possible that the same dumbness is just being broadcast wider now that there aren’t any gatekeepers, I guess.
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  It's a feedback loop that legitimizes dumbness. 40 years ago, the area 51 guy got laughed at in the bar and he stopped talking about it. Now they can all find each other and jerk each other off.
  - BlackjackCF 1y ago
    That and grifters now have a megaphone to take advantage of said dumbasses.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    I didn’t dig through their sources, but the article seemed to indicate that the amount of conspiratorial thinking hasn’t increases. So, they are jerking each other off, but not being legitimized, maybe?
nativeit 1y ago
To quote an oversimplified campaign trope: “It’s the [horrifyingly lopsided unequal] economy stupid.”
ants_everywhere 1y ago
I see a lot of intelligent people underestimating the impact of things like propaganda and advertising. The author is wrong about psychology: people are generally not savvy information consumers. They mostly converge on the average of what they see around them. Cult leaders use this to their advantage by removing people from family and non-biased sources of information. The human brain acclimates and it's hard to break away from that situation epistemically. Advertising generally works and is well measured. The process of selling people Coke or Pepsi is not fundamentally different from selling them on political ideas. And in practice many leaders have found it to be of practical utility to strengthen their power with a socially promoted ideology, whether that's religion in ancient times or state religion during the Soviet era or conspiracy theories in the current era. I'd like to see people who are skeptical of the power of propaganda tackle these issues. They tend to cite a handful of reports claiming that propaganda was ineffective in 2016, but those reports were not well done and some members of the intelligence community have publicly stated that foreign influence was decisive in the 2016 election. The official reports that I'm aware of deliberately made no assessment of the impact on the election results. If one believes that such influence is not effective, then one would have a harder time explaining why we're seeing more countries copy the Russian model. Clearly their militaries believe that it is effective. And one would also have a hard time explaining why the US engages in similar tactics abroad, including promoting anti-vax content in China. Anyway, I see why people make the sort of argument the author is making. But it doesn't seem psychologically plausible or empirically correct. And it spreads the meme that consuming propaganda 24 hours a day isn't bad for you
- msgodel 1y ago
  The last company I worked at gave us all macbooks. I noticed every few days it put an article titled something like "maybe its your parents holding you back" in the sidebar. This seems to be the default configuration on OSX. I'm surprised anyone tolerates this, if I found something like that in my house on my own equipment it would go strait in the trash.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  People who doubt the impact of propaganda need to explain how Google and Facebook bring in a hundred billion in revenue cash each quarter.
kelseyfrog 1y ago
America has been in a class war since the beginning. It just refuses to call it that. Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it. Phase One: 1770s The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, but it was anti-hereditary elite. Thomas Paine writes Common Sense. Not just your uncle's holiday rant, but part of Scottish Realism. "Self-evident" meant truths visible to anyone, no credentials required. Phase Two: 1820s–1830s Jacksonian democracy recasts the conflict: common man vs. entrenched elites in law, banking, and bureaucracy. Aristocracy = lawyers, bankers, judges. Clergy = newspapers and journalists. Populist epistemology: trust your own judgment; they're out of touch. Phase Three: Mid-20th Century Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus. Main Street is now the beacon of folk wisdom. Phase Four: 2000s Old media's monopoly dies. The internet gives Main Street a megaphone as loud as any newsroom. The Reformation comes again. Swap religion for epistemology, the printing press for the internet. When the epistemic monopoly falls, chaos follows until a new regime of knowledge stabilizes. Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option. Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime, or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize. Pick one. Then ask yourself what that choice means for what happens next.
- msgodel 1y ago
  All societies have elites, you can't eliminate that. What you want are societies where the elite's interests and the people's interests are aligned. EDIT: meh. At least aristocracies typically had a connection with the people and tended to not openly attack them or their culture.
  - kelseyfrog 1y ago
    So you have chosen aristocracy. The average inter-aristocracy interval is 417 years +/- 196. See you again in approximately the mid 25th century give or take a few.
  - 1y ago
wizardforhire 1y ago
“used to be you had to impress people to get people to watch your show… But now, all you have to do is impress the algorith. …all hail the algorithm.” -Superfastmatt
zahlman 1y ago
How come the explanations offered for declining trust in media never seem to include the media demonstrably, provably getting things wrong in a way that logically ought to weaken trust?
- jacobo37 1y ago
  perhaps the media are humans too?
- zugi 1y ago
  Exactly. We all love a fun epistemological debate about truth and objectivity. But the whole field of journalism, first in academia and then in practice, used such philosophical questions to then intentionally abandoned the goals of objectivity. Today searching for objective journalism yields only articles about how it's a myth and there never was such a thing. Sure, we all understand that biases exist and perfect objectivity can never be achieved. But today schools and newsrooms teach journalism as advocacy for causes and effecting change, and no longer even aim for objectivity. Are we really surprised or disappointed that people finally figured out that they're being preached to, not informed, by most modern "journalism?"
- Nevermark 1y ago
  That darn media, those scientists, and apolitical experts, oh don't get me talking about credible experts, all making mistakes! What is worse they admit it, even have systems for correcting errors publicly, so all those mistakes really get pushed in all our faces. Meanwhile the boutique/ideology/personality/opinion based media...
  - like_any_other 1y ago
    > What is worse they admit it, even have systems for correcting errors publicly Errors, even lies, happen, but they are negligible compared to the most powerful tool of propaganda: cherrypicking. E.g. the otherwise thorough NYT reporting on air traffic controller shortages [1] entirely omitted the FAA diversity hiring scandal that disqualified applicants with top grades if they weren't diverse enough [2]. During COVID, the credible experts were happily making models of how many deaths a motorcycle rally caused [3], but when it came time to do the same for BLM, we instead got "Protest Is a Profound Public Health Intervention" [4]. This is not an outlier - social scientists have been turning a blind eye to results they dislike since at least 1985 [5]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-controllers-safety.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-cont... [2] https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa... [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7753804/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7753804/ [4] https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/ https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/ [5] The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - from https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi..., citing the study "Human subjects review, personal values, and the regulation of social science research.": https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001
P1980Jersey 1y ago
This is now a genre of article that repeats everywhere. Its form is: "X percent of Americans agree with the statement 'vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent', which shows America has completely lost the ability to agree on basic facts, everyone is living in a different reality, and this explains why they will not agree with the following specific correct views: [...]." The reader is positioned such that if he does not agree with the specific "rational" views enumerated, he feels himself included in a group believing specific other, "irrational" things stated as the basic problem. The article becomes an instance of the problem it attempts to locate.

47 points by fmblwntr 1y ago

Author is Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI), https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/about https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/about > Our research is dedicated to ensuring AI is a force for good and it’s structured in a series of research programmes that cover a wide range of projects. Our work explores vital questions about the risks and opportunities emerging with AI in the near, mid- and long-term. These range from algorithmic transparency and the nature of intelligence to automated warfare, consciousness, social AI, feminist AI, AI-amplified injustice, global and pluriversal design, and the implications of AI for democracy, geopolitics, and the natural environment.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tpdly 1y ago
Thanks for the context. The meat of their argument, in my opinion, relies on this: > Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the balance of empirical evidence in this area does not support the claim that social media use has a large impact on users’ political attitudes and behavior. One such study they provide as a strong representative of the empirical evidence was by researchers collaborating with Meta where they did an RCT to test whether reverse-chronological vs ml algorithm feeds resulted int different political beliefs. I haven't looked into the study, but on its face that's an insanely stupid design; if my youtube feed became only reverse chronological one day I'd just open a different app after 40 seconds. Content platforms' main product is their behavior-modulating feeds, their ability to hold your eyes for 4 hours a day. The idea that this wouldn't be effecting our politics is insane.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jsrozner 1y ago

Ugh, this fellow misses the forest for the trees. Though he's partially right: social media is partially an extension of past trends. See, e.g., "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Postman. But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in arguably corrupt behavior as long as benefits outweigh costs. Google, by pioneering an internet based on advertising, shifted the allocation of the collective Internet-capital toward producing content that is engaging. You tell me if engagement correlates with truthfulness or long term utility (it doesn't). Google -- though yes initially useful and even utility-generating -- would ultimately extract all the useful latent value (including any surplus it had added) from the internet. We are left with a very high entropy internet, where you are far more likely to find factually incorrect or simply worthless content (noise) than useful content (signal). (Though, yes, bastions of order do still exist, like wikipedia.) Social media (facebook) simply did the same but instead of the broad internet, focused on extraction of value from interpersonal relationships. The result there, too, has not been good. So is the internet / social media different? Yes and no. The degree of concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and general capacity to shape the world is much greater in these companies. Whatever trends existed previously have been substantially accelerated. These companies have means to influence nearly every aspect of life. That is not something that magazines, radio, nor (untargeted) television could accomplish. Moreover, given their substantial power, companies like Goog and FB are more capable of altering the fabric of values that might otherwise have resisted change; i.e., they have accelerated the decline of institutions that would have otherwise favored truth, community, etc. America's "large scale epistemic challenges" are exactly that: our society and institutions are increasingly devoid of concern for what truth is. There aren't "right" answers to every problem, but to have a debate, there has to be some set of values against which to measure consequences, and good faith commitment to a framework to measure. That's a notion of "truth", and we have mostly lost that. Social media makes zero epistemic commitments, except whether a marginal dollar is earned. Though it is not the only problem, if your society were overrun by drug dealers turning people into mindless zombies, you might realize that it's hard to fix anything until you expel the drug dealers. This author -- at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence -- likely wants to use algorithms for democracy; i.e., his group has the new miracle pill to fix your ill.

bee_rider 1y ago

I dunno. Things seem a lot dumber since social media, but I guess it is possible that the same dumbness is just being broadcast wider now that there aren’t any gatekeepers, I guess.

bongodongobob 1y ago
It's a feedback loop that legitimizes dumbness. 40 years ago, the area 51 guy got laughed at in the bar and he stopped talking about it. Now they can all find each other and jerk each other off.
- BlackjackCF 1y ago
  That and grifters now have a megaphone to take advantage of said dumbasses.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  I didn’t dig through their sources, but the article seemed to indicate that the amount of conspiratorial thinking hasn’t increases. So, they are jerking each other off, but not being legitimized, maybe?

nativeit 1y ago

To quote an oversimplified campaign trope: “It’s the [horrifyingly lopsided unequal] economy stupid.”

ants_everywhere 1y ago

I see a lot of intelligent people underestimating the impact of things like propaganda and advertising. The author is wrong about psychology: people are generally not savvy information consumers. They mostly converge on the average of what they see around them. Cult leaders use this to their advantage by removing people from family and non-biased sources of information. The human brain acclimates and it's hard to break away from that situation epistemically. Advertising generally works and is well measured. The process of selling people Coke or Pepsi is not fundamentally different from selling them on political ideas. And in practice many leaders have found it to be of practical utility to strengthen their power with a socially promoted ideology, whether that's religion in ancient times or state religion during the Soviet era or conspiracy theories in the current era. I'd like to see people who are skeptical of the power of propaganda tackle these issues. They tend to cite a handful of reports claiming that propaganda was ineffective in 2016, but those reports were not well done and some members of the intelligence community have publicly stated that foreign influence was decisive in the 2016 election. The official reports that I'm aware of deliberately made no assessment of the impact on the election results. If one believes that such influence is not effective, then one would have a harder time explaining why we're seeing more countries copy the Russian model. Clearly their militaries believe that it is effective. And one would also have a hard time explaining why the US engages in similar tactics abroad, including promoting anti-vax content in China. Anyway, I see why people make the sort of argument the author is making. But it doesn't seem psychologically plausible or empirically correct. And it spreads the meme that consuming propaganda 24 hours a day isn't bad for you

msgodel 1y ago
The last company I worked at gave us all macbooks. I noticed every few days it put an article titled something like "maybe its your parents holding you back" in the sidebar. This seems to be the default configuration on OSX. I'm surprised anyone tolerates this, if I found something like that in my house on my own equipment it would go strait in the trash.
kridsdale1 1y ago
People who doubt the impact of propaganda need to explain how Google and Facebook bring in a hundred billion in revenue cash each quarter.

kelseyfrog 1y ago

America has been in a class war since the beginning. It just refuses to call it that. Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it. Phase One: 1770s The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, but it was anti-hereditary elite. Thomas Paine writes Common Sense. Not just your uncle's holiday rant, but part of Scottish Realism. "Self-evident" meant truths visible to anyone, no credentials required. Phase Two: 1820s–1830s Jacksonian democracy recasts the conflict: common man vs. entrenched elites in law, banking, and bureaucracy. Aristocracy = lawyers, bankers, judges. Clergy = newspapers and journalists. Populist epistemology: trust your own judgment; they're out of touch. Phase Three: Mid-20th Century Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus. Main Street is now the beacon of folk wisdom. Phase Four: 2000s Old media's monopoly dies. The internet gives Main Street a megaphone as loud as any newsroom. The Reformation comes again. Swap religion for epistemology, the printing press for the internet. When the epistemic monopoly falls, chaos follows until a new regime of knowledge stabilizes. Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option. Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime, or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize. Pick one. Then ask yourself what that choice means for what happens next.

msgodel 1y ago
All societies have elites, you can't eliminate that. What you want are societies where the elite's interests and the people's interests are aligned. EDIT: meh. At least aristocracies typically had a connection with the people and tended to not openly attack them or their culture.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  So you have chosen aristocracy. The average inter-aristocracy interval is 417 years +/- 196. See you again in approximately the mid 25th century give or take a few.
- 1y ago

wizardforhire 1y ago

“used to be you had to impress people to get people to watch your show… But now, all you have to do is impress the algorith. …all hail the algorithm.” -Superfastmatt

zahlman 1y ago

How come the explanations offered for declining trust in media never seem to include the media demonstrably, provably getting things wrong in a way that logically ought to weaken trust?

jacobo37 1y ago
perhaps the media are humans too?
zugi 1y ago
Exactly. We all love a fun epistemological debate about truth and objectivity. But the whole field of journalism, first in academia and then in practice, used such philosophical questions to then intentionally abandoned the goals of objectivity. Today searching for objective journalism yields only articles about how it's a myth and there never was such a thing. Sure, we all understand that biases exist and perfect objectivity can never be achieved. But today schools and newsrooms teach journalism as advocacy for causes and effecting change, and no longer even aim for objectivity. Are we really surprised or disappointed that people finally figured out that they're being preached to, not informed, by most modern "journalism?"
Nevermark 1y ago
That darn media, those scientists, and apolitical experts, oh don't get me talking about credible experts, all making mistakes! What is worse they admit it, even have systems for correcting errors publicly, so all those mistakes really get pushed in all our faces. Meanwhile the boutique/ideology/personality/opinion based media...
- like_any_other 1y ago
  > What is worse they admit it, even have systems for correcting errors publicly Errors, even lies, happen, but they are negligible compared to the most powerful tool of propaganda: cherrypicking. E.g. the otherwise thorough NYT reporting on air traffic controller shortages [1] entirely omitted the FAA diversity hiring scandal that disqualified applicants with top grades if they weren't diverse enough [2]. During COVID, the credible experts were happily making models of how many deaths a motorcycle rally caused [3], but when it came time to do the same for BLM, we instead got "Protest Is a Profound Public Health Intervention" [4]. This is not an outlier - social scientists have been turning a blind eye to results they dislike since at least 1985 [5]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-controllers-safety.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-cont... [2] https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa... [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7753804/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7753804/ [4] https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/ https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/ [5] The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - from https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bias-killing-social-science https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi..., citing the study "Human subjects review, personal values, and the regulation of social science research.": https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001

P1980Jersey 1y ago

This is now a genre of article that repeats everywhere. Its form is: "X percent of Americans agree with the statement 'vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent', which shows America has completely lost the ability to agree on basic facts, everyone is living in a different reality, and this explains why they will not agree with the following specific correct views: [...]." The reader is positioned such that if he does not agree with the specific "rational" views enumerated, he feels himself included in a group believing specific other, "irrational" things stated as the basic problem. The article becomes an instance of the problem it attempts to locate.