Not sure that's true, though. Here's a cloud to cover your sunshine: what if the very concept that beliefs have to correspond to observable reality is a relatively new one, or a relatively unpopular one (with a 10% of the population subscribing to it)? What if it's an unchanging constant that people believe whatever works for them in the immediate, observable way? What if it's natural for people to believe in lies, if these lies don't seem to cause obvious, instant hurt to them, and especially if these lies benefits them socially (going along better with their tribe, finding their in-group, raising status)?
I worry that for most of history, we could get away with believing in bullshit. And now we've scaled up and advanced our societies to the point they need accurate beliefs to function. Problem is, holding inaccurate beliefs doesn't usually hurt you in an immediately obvious ways, so our monkey brains don't connect the failures of our institutions with the bullshit individuals spread to each other.
The key innovation we require, as a society, are better feedback mechanisms to correct inaccurate beliefs. This means more frequent, but smaller, pain in response to mistakes. To those who object, the alternative isn't no pain, but rather, the catastrophic pain of collapse. Society is really a collection of institutions, and somehow in all institutions, loyalty has usurped principle, and accountability fails because the accuser is shunned, hated, feared. So, institution by institution, we weaken.
The solution, for example in academia, is to shun (fire, blacklist, etc) those "researchers" who cheat, lie, and distort their findings. In the justice system, lawyers, police, and judges who break the rules should be punished more, not less, severely than the rest of us. Again, these are not changes born of malice, or a desire to see more suffering, but rather a price we must accept to maintain healthy institutions with high standards, and so, prevent societal collapse.
In some ways I think "cancel culture" is a reaction to this lack of accountability, as an attempt to replace it, to ape it, almost like a cargo cult. Of course, there are huge problems with this, not the least of which there is not an institution behind it, but rather just mob rule that answers to no-one, not even itself.
There is absolutely nothing concrete that I can do on a day-to-day basis to protect my world, my friends, my family from people that I watch lie, cheat, and steal on national television. It's absolutely sickening.
I vote, and I canvass, and I donate. But man, when I see someone on twitter talking about how they think gay people should be shot like animals or something equally insane, it feels like there's one small right thing I could do, which is to make that person feel like shit. I don't, mostly -- it's just a toxic cycle for my personal wellbeing -- but I see the attraction. Yelling at people online (and to a further extent, excluding them from your world) feels like the only thing you can do sometimes.
And then we, the techno-futurists, don't want to deal with what's in front of us because its too small, doesn't scale, or because this problem will go away once we reach the economic Singularity or have flying cars or whatever utopian dream is in fashion.
Personally, I think we need better systems to leverage people's real, concrete pain into actionable change. Like, you should be able to donate money or time to fixing the things that really hurt you. Maybe its the DMV. Or maybe its traffic court. Or maybe its a late fee on a credit card. Or maybe its finding out that a fact you believed was made up. Right now, everything is so siloed. Imagine if everyone hurt by the DMV could pledge money to fix the problem.
I have come to the conclusion that managing our collective delusions is more important than correcting them. Reality is unbearable to the human psyche. Most collective delusions are benign or even beneficial to society.
To this day we know that the medical field is systematically unable to accurately treat black and female patients equivalently to white and male patients. (Unable for example to realize heart attacks in female patients represent differently for decades).
I don’t buy without formal study that the average deviation from basic opinions of reality deviate more in certain fields of study than others. Claiming it without any evidence is itself a form of deviating from observed reality.
I very much agree. However, a largely unrealized ~fact is that people from these professions (well, ones who hold the "right" ideas) are regularly portrayed by politicians and the media as flawless, omniscient, beyond reproach (which is increasingly being physically enforced on the internet, with a net that grows ever larger). The downstream consequences of this likely well-intended behavior are extremely complex - sure, censorship will provide a setback to conspiracy theorists' ability to speak their ideas freely, but how much fuel does this provide to their resolve, and how many mainstream people will see what is clearly happening and dip their toes into the pool, and have their eyes opened even further when they discover the vast amount of actually truthful information that doesn't make it into the "trustworthy mainstream news" (even further reinforcing the idea in their mind that the public is lied to, and illustrating that this is done regularly)?
A meme war approach to governance seems like not the best approach for the sole (for now) superpower on the planet, and they have a very delicate balancing act to truth-proof the internet without the mainstream masses noticing and starting to ask questions.
We've been warned about this behavior many times throughout history by people wiser than ourselves, perhaps as a species it might be an opportune time to pause for a moment and consider where the path we are currently heading down at stop speed eventually leads.
"A liar should have a good memory." - Quintilian
"If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything." - Mark Twain
"The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later thousandfold." - Aristotle
Verifiable history of changes teaches to check twice before blaming another.
... have we? Much of the 20th century was spent at war, with a death total somewhere in the region of a hundred million. As were most of the previous centuries. There have been isolated pockets where one might have a lifetime of stability over a wide area, but few of those were also "free".
> The problem we have is that social media should not exist
The challenge is to thread the needle between freedom degenerating into chaos and murder (Rohingya, etc) and total clampdown that also escalates into disappearances and murder.
The opposite of social media today (election manipulation, divided societies, ethnic cleansing) is the state of affairs before social media, which wasn't bad at all. I'm struggling to think of large-scale benefits social media has brought us, because the individual ones like talking more to grandma and getting more dates are clear enough. But come on, people should just pick up that phone and go out more.
It's obvious that the Internet and social media wouldn't solve these issues with people, or hide these flaws in humanity. I am baffled why people think it would. It's just another form of something governments or institutions cannot handle/control, which has been occurring since written history began. The only difference is the sheer quantity and ease of having a voice these days.
(For reference regarding my use of these "platforms": I use YouTube periodically to mainly watch the C++ conference videos to further highlight how out of touch I am with the modern iterations of the language, but have nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter since I found it to be a stream of people talking about themselves; by definition that is not a conversation, so is not social and should be renamed "Selfish Media" IMHO).
I disagree. I would lose the ability to contact many good friends.
a surprising number of people don't realize that a) carriers are obligated to port their number and b) it is possible to transfer contacts when they buy a new phone. instead of fixing the original problem, they post "hey new number (xxx)-xxx-xxxx, add me!" or "new phone, send your numbers!" to facebook or instagram. I can't explain how this is supposed to work to every single person I want to stay in contact with, and I don't check social media much so I tend to miss these posts.
if I lost my facebook account, it wouldn't be a huge issue. I'd be able to track everyone down on other platforms. if all social media were shut down, there are at least a couple people I'd never be able to contact again.
And go out.. where, exactly?
"But I didn't mean those!"
OK, fine, now we need to define social media. Clearly everybody wants to count Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. But some of the major incidents come from memetic circulation of fake news and racial hatred propaganda etc on Whatsapp. The Christchurch shooter (and others) were radicalised by 4/8chan. Both he and Anders Breivik also cited racial hatred material produced by "traditional", "legitimate" sources such as major newspapers.
(I wonder if anyone's ever done an "impact factor of evil" analysis on the citation graphs of mass shooter manifestoes? Going all the way back to Kaczynski, T and beyond)
> people should just pick up that phone and go out more
You've missed all the "millenials NEVER answer the phone" memes, then?
> The opposite of social media today (election manipulation, divided societies, ethnic cleansing) is the state of affairs before social media, which wasn't bad at all
My point is that none of those are new, it's just that people struggle to recognise the warning patterns. Countries that were badly hit by SARS-COV were more attuned to the risks of SARS-COV-2. Countries that were badly hit by 20th century fascism are more attuned to the risks of 21st century fascism. Hence all the endless (somewhat fruitless) discussion about who counts as a Nazi and when it might be OK to punch them.
It's not just the medium, we have to look at the messages. Can we ban certain messages without throwing out the medium?
Here's my definition of the elements of "toxic social media":
1) the automated surfacing of messages from random people because they are "popular" (i.e. highly engaged) mixed in with personal messages. This is the amplifying effect that makes things hot.
2) the immediacy - a message can be spread insanely rapidly, faster than any individual humans can understand or respond to it. This is the fuel.
It's the fact that it happens at an inhuman scale that I think is the biggest part. Email at a human-to-human level is like letter writing. Information can travel through it, but it can't amplify by bypassing the human connections in the way that Twitter trending topics can. Likewise 1:1 or limited-sized groups on Whatsapp.
I'd even put Facebook groups into that bucket, so long as they're full of humans who know each other. It's once you get to groups with millions of people who don't know each other directly that things get out of hand.
Seen in that perspective, social media could be considered a part of the problem simply for being a way for people to voice their opinions, but as you wrote, a "fediverse" would not be more resistant to disruptive opinions. It will be a problem as long a people have a variety of ways to communicate with lots of people.
I think it's naive to assume that a fediverse wouldn't eventually include somebody developing such an algorithm that becomes popular among the average user base.
Blaming algorithims is the "big lie" essentially of repeating something enough that people eventually believe it is true. I noticed it before and dismissed it as the bullshit it was but even computer literate people are falling for the hysteria.
In fact, casualties of war, as a percentage of population, have been more or less constant for hundreds of years.
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-yea...
Perhaps the rules have changed now, due to mutually assured destruction.
It's increasingly difficult to have rational conversations with Americans these days, and this idea is certainly a big part of it.
It just astonishes me that Americans see little difference between a private company forbidding liars from using their free service, and people being rounded up at gunpoint and being killed.
(I seem to have been misunderstood quite badly, a sibling comment to yours makes exactly the opposite allegation! Also, I'm a Brit)
The risk of any ban system is that true-but-inconvenient stuff ends up getting banned as well. The very real risk that video evidence of murders by police might be banned for "promoting violence", for example. There's already the controversy over removing evidence of war crimes in Syria - kind of understandable, given that those must be pretty traumatic videos.
(yes, this is a pre-crime argument, but crimes against humanity committed by and on behalf of states or warring ethnic factions are qualitively different from ordinary crime.)
I think you’re inflating the views of the few outspoken fools too be that of the majority.
So you are saying we should just get rid of the internet? Social media is not just a few popular sites. It is the entirety of the internet. You get rid of the "social media" sites and people will still connect. Crap will still flow. You'll obviously see a temporary drop until people adjust and reconnect. The internet is about connecting people and making the exchange of information easier. You cannot get rid of "social media" without getting rid of the internet.
The evolution of a species never stops, even if it gets a bit slow. And our brains may have changed in the last 10'000 years too. Possibly even in the last 200.
To your other point, I think that "education" and "critical thinking skills" are often conflated as one and the same, or that perhaps one necessarily leads to the other, but this is certainly not the case. While I think being educated to some degree is important in order to share a "common language" with others and to become a contributing member of society, the ability to think critically, and to act on it, is really necessary if we are to succeed and not fail catastrophically along the way.
To go back to the analogy, having the ability to execute the software faithfully is one thing, but understanding when it might make sense to modify the software and how to do so responsibly given the fixed hardware we have available is really the critical piece.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/humans-are-evolving-an-ext...
Totally static for the last few millennia.
It's a pretty far leap from that to saying something should not exist. But I'll bite. How are they not aligned, and why does it not merit existence?
But it's a good question and I'll try to reply in a brief and somewhat hand-wavy way (due to the medium, space, etc) Everything I'm going to say has caveats. And I can't cover them all. Meh.
If you believe that the species as a whole has never been this unstable before, then the real question is this: what has changed? Whatever it is, it's obviously happened in the last 20 years, maybe even in the last 7 or so. The thing to do would be to identify those changes and come up with a testable theory that can be tested using the data. In general, however, I am persuaded that the overall problem is that we've incentivized consumer technology based on a battle for attention span. This isn't new; it's been going on forever. But the network effect has shot it through the roof, and even simple AI is proving quite capable of taking that business model even further. If it weren't, there wouldn't be so much money in it.
+If you accept that premise, then that's how the conversation should generally go. If you don't accept that premise, then we need to back up a bit and talk about the effects of technology in general.
Here's a more detailed explanation and defense of my underlying thesis I published twelve years ago. This just didn't appear overnight; a lot of folks were trying to ring the warning bells earlier. (BTW, when I published it on HN, it got a lot of votes, but it also got a lot of "Well, sure, but 1) there'll be a new startup that will replace big tech soon, 2) we'll just invent some new app that will solve the problems we have from the current apps, etc") It was a sad demonstration of how all of us tech folk have a tendency to do the best we can to deny and ignore any implications of what we're doing aside from wondering whether our server is up. (I exaggerate for effect)
http://tiny-giant-books.com/Entry1.html?EntryId=recgcpfuOFUe...
EDITED FOR CLARITY (Addition marked)
What does this actually mean? The world is a very big place, covered by lots of political, economic, and power systems.
The West - primarily, but not exclusively, the English-speaking parts - has seen a big change in the way politics is conducted, with less dignity and more verbal viciousness, but this hasn't really been matched by physical or "kinetic" politics. The sibling comment that there are fewer bombs going off is correct. Even Islamic fundamentalism has got less dangerous in the west - while the great middle eastern war started in 2001 rages on, expanding upwards to Nagoro-Karabakh.
If we want to talk stability, perhaps we should return to control systems theory. The feedback loops of the world have got shorter and faster. This moves the poles of the system around - and, without damping, makes it less stable.
As far as I can tell, the OP is right; It's political instability that can instantly touch the globe, along with WMDs, and a head of the state who seems unwilling to adhere to peaceful transfer of power (see: "Will he go?")
I'm really tired of the word "privileged", so much so that I've become a snowflake and get /instantly/ triggered by its usage. It seems to be the "commie" of our era.
> Intelligence is going down as fewer and fewer books are being read (news flash: the printed book industry is on the way out unless this trend stops), and social organizations like churches and civic clubs see fewer and fewer members attend their meetings. The skills that are increasing? Reflex time. Ability to solve abstract, short-timespan problems. Basically the skills we need to interact with our entertainment. More and more, Indians and Chinese – people coming from cultures who have been shut out of the technical world until recently – are writing software for hardcore western appetites to consume.
"Ability to solve abstract, short-timespan problems"
I wonder about this. I speculatively propose that there also seems to be a curious inability (or unwillingness) for people who happen to be blessed with the skill of abstract thinking, to apply that skill to the greater world (the complex system we have built for ourselves to live within). I would say that abstract thinking, done right, allows the one wielding it the ability to step out of the ~axiomatic frame in which they live, and use to evaluate the world with a relatively clean mind - to set their individual political beliefs and preferences aside and consider things from a disinterested 3rd party perspective. At least to some degree. And I think mass social media, including forums like this one, likely contribute in significant ways that we do not currently understand. Whether a change in our aggregate ability has taken place over time, I have no opinion, but an ambitious person could likely pick up on it if it had by reviewing conversations from a decade ago or so.
> If you believe that the species as a whole has never been this unstable before, then the real question is this: what has changed? Whatever it is, it's obviously happened in the last 20 years, maybe even in the last 7 or so. The thing to do would be to identify those changes and come up with a testable theory that can be tested using the data.
This seems like the kind of abstract thinking (disconnection from the specific object level characteristics of the problem) that we need more of. Do you happen to have any theories on what steps we should be considering to get us out of this mess, that could plausibly be applied at national or planetary scale (or, know of any formal or informal organizations that are working on such ideas)?
Despite tons of noise in social media, real life up has been incredibly stable for the last couple of decades in the west. The least amount of violence, lowest extreme poverty, highest disposable income, etc etc.
In the 70s (before social media), there were multiple bombings every year in the US. That is completely unfathomable today. The headlines and discussions on social media today now heavily surround parsing Trumps words and arguing about how he’s racist and doing things wrong.
Social media is just giving you the impression that things are unstable because people like to complain when by any standard long-term measure it’s just as stable as ever (barring recent economic instability caused by COVID).
Some questions about the US?
- when was the last time a prominent politician was assassinated? - when was the last time a government building was bombed? - when was the last time a prominent politician was assaulted and left in the hospital?
This isn't universally true in the US. Millions lost their homes in the great recession and never fully recovered, it's just easy to forget that the American economy doesn't work for everyone when it does work for you. Now millions more face eviction and starvation amidst a major public health crisis.
> In the 70s (before social media), there were multiple bombings every year in the US. That is completely unfathomable today.
True, but mass shootings were unfathomable in the 70's and happen at an alarming rate today. To your point, we've largely become desensitized to those stories because they just happen so often now. I think that the patterns of violence have shifted, not the presence of violence.
> Social media is just giving you the impression that things are unstable because people like to complain when by any standard long-term measure it’s just as stable as ever
I disagree with this too. Wealth inequality is skyrocketing and has been for many years. Average life expectancy has been declining in the US. Our current president has discussed running for a 3rd term and preemptively declined to accept the results of a Presidential election overseen by his own government. Has that ever happened before?
> when was the last time a prominent politician was assassinated? - when was the last time a government building was bombed? - when was the last time a prominent politician was assaulted and left in the hospital?
These questions say more about the government's ability to protect its members than providing insight into the stability of society. Congressman Steve Scalise was shot in 2017 during a practice session for a congressional baseball game, but survived. Gabby Giffords was shot in 2011 and survived. There are numerous attempts at these things that we'll surely never know about.
It's also worth pointing out that a group plotted to kidnap the sitting governor of Michigan and try her for treason. Law enforcement officials interviewed about that case largely said they'd never seen anything like that before.
On a per capita basis, home ownership was at an all-time high during the 2000s before the crisis and crashed down to 90s levels after the crisis and has returned now to a level not ever seen during the 1900s. In the worst of the Great Recession more people still owned homes than during the 70s-80s.
Starvation is not a realistic outcome for anyone in the US who chooses to use social safety nets. Both government and private programs provide meals to people who need them and are available all across the country. What you might be thinking of is “food insecure” households, which are people that would need such programs.
WRT wealth inequality, that is mostly a meaningless statistic for actual lifestyle of the lower and middle class. All it tells you is that the wealth growth was faster at the top than at the bottom. Not that the bottom got worse or even stayed stagnant for that matter.
From the perspective of the data on violence, purchasing power, disposable income, home ownership, etc, society appears to be quite stable. From the perspective of shared stories on social media, I can see why you might be led to think otherwise.
the richest city on earth has a sizable, entrenched homeless population that openly do drugs on the street. Are we not in the midst of the opioid epidemic? Can what happens in Chicago be characterized as a war?
There is deep dysfunction and societal numbness to not see these realities; despite the riches accrued and the definitive technological advance, these problems are apparently unable to be solved.
You'll need a different gauge than that. I'll give you life expectancy. But I'll raise you obesity and other self-induced problems that have gotten worse statistically.
It certainly isn't. But it is more polarized and increasing content control in the last 10 years made everything 10x times worse. We continue on this path...
If people just could run their mouths more freely in the most vulgar form, I think the situation would improve quickly. Some people watch sports for that, but I think really telling you opinion to someone on the internet can also be helpful. I don't think the world is ending from that.
We get quite a lot of Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe still, but they do seem to be getting less effective over time - A man with a knife rather than a man with a truck.
Before the USSR collapsed, when was the last time a prominent Soviet politician was assassinated, a Soviet government building bombed, a prominent Soviet politician assaulted and left in the hospital?
At least 200,000 Americans and probably a lot more have died in the last eight months, most of them completely unnecessarily. Waving this away as "economic instability" shows a lack of perspective.
And over all hangs the grim spectre of the climate emergency, which we as a species are doing nothing to fix.
Sorry, but as a civilization we are fucked.
When was America ever "peaceful" or "progressive"? I lived there for thirty years and my ideas, boring and mainstream by European standards, were constantly considered "laughable", "naïve", "ignorant." Now I live in Europe again, where I again get all the things that Americans thought were laughable and impossible.
In particular, America's been continuously at war for my whole life, and I'm no longer a young man. America's spent more money on weapons than the next ten countries put together. Calling America "peaceful" is totally false to the fact - it's obscene considering you've killed hundreds of thousands of completely innocent people in the last twenty years.
Here's a bit of sunshine: the human species has not changed in thousands of years. We're still the same hairless monkeys we were back when people were thinking up all kinds of cool shit. Knowing this, it follows that 10% or so of the population are, well, nuts. Another 10% are so are willing to do anything to become famous. It has always been this way. (Of course, I'm just guessing the exact numbers)
What's happened is that these folks are using this wonderful new instant worldwide publishing tool we've made to continue their pathologies. And companies are happy to make money letting them do so as long as nobody gets too upset. We are now reaching the point where lots of people are getting upset and those companies are running around like a single fireman in a city on fire trying to figure out how to make their business keep going.
The good news is that we're still the same species as before, and we've solved over and over again the problem of what it takes to have a peaceful and progressive society. The problem we have is that social media should not exist. It shouldn't be regulated, broken up, or any of that. It simply should not exist. The incentives here are not aligned with the survival of our species (There's a huge discussion of what to make instead. That's for another day)
I think the problem is not easy to solve, but it's certainly easy to explain. It's not the end of civilization as we know it, at least it doesn't have to be.