Re:Negativity Drives Online News Consumption
by nonethewiser on Friday March 17, 2023 @05:53PM
(#35203401)
That’s an interesting take. I’m not sure I fully agree. Lots of things are scary. But not everything that is scary is worth constantly defending against. When the news oversamples or misrepresents then people will orient themselves towards a worse world that doesn’t exist. It leads to unjustified resentment and animosity.
Re:Negativity Drives Online News Consumption
by ActorNightly on Sunday March 19, 2023 @12:25AM
(#35216017)
Its not about defense, its about information efficiency. Bad events are rarer, and knowledge about them is more valuable than good events.
Lets say that you had to walk through a minefield with a set number of mines. You could pay me $10 for a piece of information. I can either tell you a spot with a mine, or a spot without one. How do you spend your money?
It works for ML too. If Tesla had a set of training data that was inversed, ie the vast majority of cars were involved in a crash, it would have a fully working level 5 autonomous autopilot 2 years ago.
Its much more efficient to have the knowledge of statistically improbable but bad actions to avoid, rather to have a set of good actions where you don't know where the boundaries are.