Tell an algorithm to optimize for engagement and it will promote the content causing the most engagement: novelty, conspiracy theory, outrage, surprising "revelations" and all sorts of clickbait.
If we removed Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok and reverted YouTube to the pre-algorithmic (subscription based) era, we'd still have free speech on the internet but probably a lot less bullshit.
Note: Twitter would still promote bullshit even without a ML algorithm. The rules of engagement:
- short content
- individual popularity means content popularity
- retweeting is instant, requires no critical thought
A big part of the anti-vaxx movement comes from the fact that the government have made it very clear they will lie and misrepresent data whenever it is politically advantageous for them.
If you want a very recent exemple, just look at this interview from someone very high up in the food chain at Bayer (youtube.com/watch?v=qowDwaYx7vI) and then try googling about whether or not mRNA is gene therapy. it was considered dangerous misinformation to say what he just did and yet he is overseeing the fabrication of covid vaccines.
It's far from the best example, but it's one where I won't have to waste an hour getting proper sources
However, even if it delivers to you true information about abuses and lies being told to you, you should still be aware that the system is doing this so that you will be outraged, rather than that you will be informed.
Here the exec is stretching the definition of the term gene therapy to include things that don't alter genes "mRNA vaccines are an example for that cell and gene therapy". He basically makes a mistake, because the same platform is also used for gene therapy.
To use a software analogy, just because both mRNA vaccines and mRNA gene therapies are software, doesn't mean that mRNA vaccines perform system updates (instead they trip the suspicious behavior detection of the anti-virus and trigger a download for new virus definition files).
Additional subtle distortion happens later on social media when people take this mistake and "shrink" it in the opposite direction "actually mRNA vaccines are NOT vaccines because they're gene therapy".
Joe Rogan then takes that and stretches it further to imply this is why the vaccines don't last long
> This is really gene therapy. It's a different thing. It’s tricking your body into producing spike protein and making these antibodies for COVID. But it’s only good for a few months, they’re finding out now. The efficacy wanes after five or six months. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t take it. But I’m saying, you’re calling it a thing that it’s not. It’s not exactly what you’re saying it is, and you’re mandating people take it
Sinopharm makes a COVID vaccine from dead / inactivated virus. Its used widely in China as well as in the developing world. We've also seen the same reduced antibody neutralisation there, and it isn't necessarily because of the passage of time but to a large extent due to the evolution of the virus to be significantly different from the original.
So yeah, this is a perfect example of how social media spreads engaging novelty - whether its deliberate disinformation or simply mistakes - and continues to distort it further by continuously applying stretching and shrinking. The info blob continues to evolve to evade people's "immune defences" and cause them to re-share it (e.g. retweet).
This is not something new, traditional media have been doing it for decades ever since the rise of the yellow press, with varying levels of subtlety. The difference is that this here is an "organic", crowdsourced process that yields better, more convincing results, as it has to defeat the "immune systems" of many people to get a good reach via resharing. Only the highest quality misinformation makes it through.
The worst bit about this phenomenon is that corrections don't work well. People who haven't heard the rumor don't care about the correction (its not interesting) so they don't share it. People that have heard the rumor before don't like being wrong, so they don't share it either. So it doesn't matter how many scientists explain the difference, the explanation will never have anywhere close to the reach of the original (likely hundreds of millions of people)
There is nothing organic about the speech that happens on YouTube. Veritasium explains the shift that happened when youtube switched to an algorithmic model from the subscriber model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 - you need to carefully manipulate people to click your thumbnail based on the picture and the video title.
Making outrageous but believable shit up to sensationalize your content is a well known tactic of tabloids (which does continue today to some extent). YouTube and other social media incentivise exactly that.
The particular platform that has these characteristics is arbitrary and beside the point. No one is arguing that Tik Toks particular implementation of a short form engagement optimizing feed is dangerous.
Technology is supposed to compensate for our failings, not exaggerate them to the extreme.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/michelle-shock...
The Clown Timeline might have been the last Cold-War era weapon, a doomsday weapon.
"You were -too cautious- about that new disease that was killing everybody in 1985" feels more like a dark joke than a serious claim. Everybody was shocked when Rock Hudson died in 1985.
History repeats itself.
If you ask anyone who was senior working in these institutions in the 1970s, things were far more dodgy back then.
Corruption and bigotry were rampant. But it was far easier to cover up back in the day.
Politicization is mostly driven by transparency.
Politicization is not a new thing, it's a fact that there's a lot of extremely conservative individuals in each country. And technology has bought them closer to their institutions.
Society is being brought very closely together, and we're working through the teething issues.
It is wild how people think things like institutional bigotry aren't politics. How is a scientific organization that excludes large swaths of the population due purely to the circumstances of their birth apolitical? Science has always been political because politics is how people interact with each other. That is true whether we are discussing how governments behave on the world stage or how that big project is being managed at your job. Wherever people exist, politics exists.
How are you using “conservative” here? The right certainly has no monopoly politicizing science.
But, if we acknowledge that was true then – why shouldn't we expect the same to be true now? The prevailing prejudices and ideologies may have changed, but has anything changed about the actual practice of science to make it more immune to those forces? I think a lot of people can't see it, because it is far easier to see when science is being influenced by beliefs you reject than when it is being influenced by beliefs you yourself share.
I think the politicisation of science is inevitable, and science is never going to be entirely politically neutral. Scientists are human beings, and as Aristotle famously said, "man is a political animal". I think science is going to achieve the maximum possible political neutrality when it is either (a) things so clearly established no one can sensibly debate them (which especially happens when scientific theories get translated into widely adopted working technologies–the very fact that the technology works is proof the theories behind it must be mostly correct); (b) things that avoid political entanglements because they have little relevance to everyday human life (e.g. string theory vs loop quantum gravity isn't influenced by broader societal politics because it has no relevance to issues of social/cultural/economic/political power, although even it is surely influenced by the micro-politics of the theoretical physics community, its funding models, etc.)
Take something like human-induced climate change – personally, I accept the mainstream account of that topic as most likely to be correct, but I can't be completely sure that it is right, surely there is some non-zero probability (even if a small one) that it is wrong. But, I expect people in a couple of centuries from now will be able to reach a much firmer consensus – they'll know whose predictions turned out to be right, plus technological and economic developments will likely greatly reduce the number of people with a vested economic interest in the non-mainstream answer. I think the most likely outcome will be that the mainstream account will be vindicated, and almost everyone will acknowledge that the minority were wrong; but it isn't absolutely impossible that it could turn out the other way around. And whichever way it turns out, I think people will see politics as having played a major role – if the mainstream account is confirmed, people will see much of the opposing minority as being led astray by politics; but, conversely, if the sceptical minority turn out to have been right all along, people will reach the same conclusion with respect to today's mainstream.
Compare now to ten years ago, before me too. Things are hugely different.
I fully expect that if you give it a long time, things will be markedly better. In a hundred years for example.
Perceptions of progress seem to depend a lot on (a) where in the world you are, (b) what things you value, (c) whether you choose to optimistically focus on the positive developments (from the viewpoint of your own values) or pessimistically focus on the negative.
Even if we agree that certain forms of progress are occurring, do those various forms of progress necessarily entail scientific progress? I think, the only form of progress which necessarily entails scientific progress is technological progress – but even for that, some scientific fields have much greater technological relevance than others, continuing technological progress requires continuing scientific progress in technologically-relevant fields, yet is compatible with going backwards in areas of science which lack direct technological application.
Getting physics and chemistry right is really essential to technological progress. How can technology advance if your physics and chemistry are wrong?
But, what about "softer" sciences, such as psychology or the social sciences? It seems you could be moving in the complete wrong direction with them, and yet still be advancing technologically – because technology largely doesn't depend on them.
And even for the "hard sciences", technology generally only depends on certain areas of them. How much of the Standard Model of physics is actually technologically relevant? Technological progress is strong evidence you've got the technologically-relevant parts of physics right, but is compatible with serious error in low technological-relevance areas. What is the technological relevance of electroweak unification, for example?
We also don't know what we are missing out on. Neuroscience is an area of biological research in which many promises of clinical translation have thus far failed to deliver. Is that because this the brain is very complicated, and we just have to wait longer and invest more before we see more results? Or could it be that we are doing the science wrong, and we'd clinically be in a much better situation now if we were doing it right? How can one tell which of those two possible situations we are actually in?
Why say "in the past"? Do you think it's not now?
Historically, scientists either were well-off and independent (e.g. Ulug beg, Newton, Cavendish), or worked at the expense of very rich personal patrons (e.g. Tycho). This limited the number of potential scientists, and the amount of science done, quite drastically.
In 18th-20th centuries it was somehow overcome, when partly states, partly industries gave more scientists more resources. By mid-20th century, the system started to develop cracks, as science became increasingly driven by formal metrics, such as impactful publications. The metrics are actively gamed, but worse, since science is unpredictable, honestly checking everything and building a picture of reality became a worse strategy than going for a flashy if more weakly researched result.
I don't know a good way out of the current trap.
Research is a high stakes, high rewards type of game. You need to pursue many potential ways forward, and most likely only one will win.
Rewarding short term wins makes academia no different from industry, and prevents finding anything but the local maxima.
It's not like the medical system was a highly trusted and respected institution that politicians somehow undermined in the last few months. The lost of trust in the medical system has been literally over 150 years in the making. If you read some books on the history of the rise of homeopathy in the United States in the mid 1800s, the parallels with today aren't exactly subtle.
That absolutely will never happen as long as the funding comes from the government.
The best you could possibly achieve is funding purely through small time (non business) donations from the public - and I'm still a little skeptical as to the scope of research that could realistically fund.
Of course it would. Whoever pays the piper always calls the tune.
It's no surprise that NPR and PBS advocate for the government point of view.
What I'm talking about is removing micromanagement and ensuring that the institution is trusted.
Social media just put some gas on a fire with engagement optimization. The rest was just human nature.
We need to separate research from politics. It needs to be a separate pillar of the state. You don't want reseachers chasing funds continously and doing short-term research for local sponsors. You want sizeable investments in long-term research projects, high autonomy and following of the scientific method. This way people would trust the results.