I’m a bit surprised this post has so little karma and engagement. I would be really interested to hear from people who think this is a complete distraction.
Good recommendation engines are really important for our epistemic environment, in my opinion more than for example prediction markets. Because it indeed affects so much of the content that people ingest in their daily lives, on a large scale.
The tough question is how tractable it is. Tournesol has some audience, but also seems to struggle to scale it up despite pretty mature software. I really don’t know how effective it would be to pressure companies like Facebook or TikTok, or to push for regulation, or to conduct more research on how to improve recommendation algorithms. Seems worth investigating whether there are cost-effective opportunities, whether through grants or job recommendations.
“I really don’t know how tractable it would be to pressure compagnies” seems weirdly familiar. We already used the same argument for AGI safety, and we know that governance work is much more tractable than expected.
Helping to enforce the DSA might be one opportunity. The DSA is a constraining piece of legislation, but the team tasked with monitoring online platforms and enforce it is understaffed, especially in the early days (these roles were actually on the 80,000 Hours jobs board). So, perhaps there could be an opportunity e.g. in finding ways to help them automatically detect or verify compliance issues, if they accept such contributions.
For Tournesol, their website doesn’t appear to have changed so much during the last year, so I suppose it is pretty mature. They also have other projects, and they tend to foster a community of French volunteers interested in recommendation algorithms. It depends on whether such projects could have a large-scale impact.
I don’t Tournesol is really mature currently, especially for non french content, and I’m not sure they try to do governance works, that’s mainly a technical projet, which is already cool.
I’m a bit surprised this post has so little karma and engagement. I would be really interested to hear from people who think this is a complete distraction.
Good recommendation engines are really important for our epistemic environment, in my opinion more than for example prediction markets. Because it indeed affects so much of the content that people ingest in their daily lives, on a large scale.
The tough question is how tractable it is. Tournesol has some audience, but also seems to struggle to scale it up despite pretty mature software. I really don’t know how effective it would be to pressure companies like Facebook or TikTok, or to push for regulation, or to conduct more research on how to improve recommendation algorithms. Seems worth investigating whether there are cost-effective opportunities, whether through grants or job recommendations.
“I really don’t know how tractable it would be to pressure compagnies” seems weirdly familiar. We already used the same argument for AGI safety, and we know that governance work is much more tractable than expected.
Helping to enforce the DSA might be one opportunity. The DSA is a constraining piece of legislation, but the team tasked with monitoring online platforms and enforce it is understaffed, especially in the early days (these roles were actually on the 80,000 Hours jobs board). So, perhaps there could be an opportunity e.g. in finding ways to help them automatically detect or verify compliance issues, if they accept such contributions.
For Tournesol, their website doesn’t appear to have changed so much during the last year, so I suppose it is pretty mature. They also have other projects, and they tend to foster a community of French volunteers interested in recommendation algorithms. It depends on whether such projects could have a large-scale impact.
I don’t Tournesol is really mature currently, especially for non french content, and I’m not sure they try to do governance works, that’s mainly a technical projet, which is already cool.