No, I don’t think that follows. One of the lessons of Inadequate Equilibria is that both individuals and groups get stuck in situations that are not “good enough” by any measure, simply because no individual has enough “free energy” to force a change to something better.
To me, Facebook is yet another Inadequate Equilibrium. We don’t use it because it’s good, we use it because that’s where we started out, and no one has enough pull in our community to force a global change. If someone manages to change it at a global level in the rationalist community, we would look back upon our usage of Facebook and wonder why we ever bothered to use such a terrible tool.
The relevant question here is “is there _currently_ an alternative, such that if everyone switched from FB to another thing at the same time, they’d all be better off?”. The context of the OP was “we built a tool by which people could all agree to switch from FB if and only if a bunch of other people switched from FB at once – why didn’t that work?”
And to that, I think there’s actually a pretty good case to be made that “no, there is not a good enough alternative to FB.” FB does a lot of things well – it can afford to because it’s a huge company and spends lots on R&D and fine-tuning itself.
The parts of FB that are bad are due to how it’s monetized and what incentives it has. Any alternative to FB would have to be monetized differently, or have to be (to some degree) altruistic project, or you’d have to have people making peace with a less polished project that didn’t have as much developer resources.
This doesn’t mean it can’t be done. (I think discord is actually monetized in a pretty reasonable way, where you get access to cooler emoji by paying $5/month while otherwise being free). But someone has to actually build it, and it requires a lot of effort.
I’ve looked at the attempts to build “open source aesthetic facebook” (that’s built from the ground up to leave the power with users rather than the monetization system). And… it was quite bad. Google+ might have been better, but I have no reason to assume Google+ would be any less evil than FB over the long term. (I think they couldn’t quite get away with being as evil initially since they had to tempt people away from FB).
To be honest, I think that if we start talking about “an alternative to Facebook” or “switching from Facebook to some other thing”, or “building a Facebook replacement”, we’re off to a bad start.
An analogy: suppose you have a Swiss army knife, which you use to chop vegetables, saw through wooden beams, trim your nails, etc. I observe that said tool is really quite sub-par. You ask me what I think is an alternative tool you should use. Should you switch from the Swiss army knife to some other thing? Do I have a Swiss army knife replacement to offer you?
No, of course not. It’s just that you should chop vegetables with a chef’s knife, saw through wooden beams with a saw, trim your nails with a nail trimmer, etc.
Now suppose I said this to you, and you replied: “A chef’s knife isn’t a Swiss army knife replacement! It doesn’t saw wood and it doesn’t trim my nails. A saw isn’t a Swiss army knife replacement! It doesn’t chop vegetables and it doesn’t trim my nails. A nail trimmer isn’t …”
You’d be missing the point, right?
FB does a lot of things well
Well… not really! That’s the thing; Facebook doesn’t really do a lot of things well. It does a lot of things, and it does some things well (probably; I have my doubts, but let’s grant it).
The better question, IMO (instead of those I list above) is: for each X, where X is something you use Facebook for, what should you use?
For some X, the answer will be “Facebook”.
For some other X, the answer will be “not Facebook; instead, [thing]”. The value of [thing] will not be the same for all X.
I do think the basic analogy you’re pointing at here is important to consider. Maybe FB should be split into it’s component parts. (And to be clear, even if we need a swiss army knife I think FB is quite subpar as a swiss army knife and someone should be making a better one, with the caveat that they need to actually address the incentives problem in a way that makes sense and I expect it to be a lot of work)
But much of FB’s value prop lies in having access to all of it’s userbase, to do various things with everyone I know, and have those things work in tandem. I can communicate with large or small groups that I want to communicate with, and invite them to events, and seamlessly blend between the two. Creating a userbase is hard, so there’s a strong benefit to swiss-army-ness.
Epistemic Status: Increasingly strained metaphor
I think FB is less like a crappy swiss army knife that doesn’t work properly, and more like a kitchen that doesn’t work. (Or rather, everything works, but the fridge and cabinets automatically restock themselves, and charges me when I take things out of it.… but they periodically move things around in the fridge to force me to bump into new things to take out and get charged for so I can impulse buy different things. (Supermarkets actually essentially do do this and it’s kinda annoying but less intrusive because it’s not my home that they’re re-arranging)).
This feature is undesirable to me and I want to fix it… and I could buy a new fridge, and a new cabinet, and all my own vegetables, etc. But buying any individual one of these means it has to live in a different kitchen that doesn’t come with all the rest of my stuff. I have to buy all the things in order for any of them to be nearly as useful. Which is quite expensive. [Also, I’d have to pay for them all (whereas the Auto-Wonder-Kitchen was free because it was running on weird product placement).]
Google has a similar set of products as FB, and does keep them a bit more distinct from each other. (i.e. you can use email to communicate with people, and calendar to invite them to events, and you can just use email and calendar in a way where you can’t just use any given segment of FB except for Messenger). And you get to re-use the same set of contacts in between google apps. But that segregation already has some issues (it’s not quit
But what Google doesn’t do (as well as FB) is basically provide ways to spam all your friends with stuff they might or might not be interested in, and make it easy-ish for them to opt into which collection of spam they want. (Google attempts to do this but has never really succeeded IMO). When I say I want a FB replacement, “spam almost exactly the right people” is basically the feature I want.
So, there’s definitely a lot to engage with, here, and I don’t think I could do justice to all of what you say in a single comment (in particular, I have a lot to say about the “spam all your friends with stuff they might or might not be interested in” thing[1]). Some scattered thoughts follow, with possibly more to come later…
… I could buy a new fridge, and a new cabinet, and all my own vegetables, etc. But buying any individual one of these means it has to live in a different kitchen that doesn’t come with all the rest of my stuff. I have to buy all the things in order for any of them to be nearly as useful. Which is quite expensive.
So, in the world of your kitchen analogy, that does seem true. But in the real world, and talking about Facebook, it’s actually not true!
Here’s an example. Eliezer has, for some years now, been “blogging”, so to speak, on Facebook. This has always perplexed me. Oh, I can understand the sentiment of “access to all my friends” that you mention, sure. (I may disagree, but I understand the argument, even if I find it ultimately unconvincing.)
But that is an argument for posting things on Facebook, it is not an argument for hosting things on Facebook!
You see? Eliezer could have a blog! He could have a Wordpress blog (wordpress.com or self-hosted), or use any number of other blogging engines; and then, he could link or cross-post or “share” those blog posts on Facebook. (I trust I do not need to go over the technical, accessibility, openness, archival, control, and many other advantages of doing so.)
So here is a potential “move away from Facebook” that does not require a “different kitchen”, etc. It’s fully interoperable with the existing stuff; it offers great advantages; and it facilitates a future “total abandonment” of Facebook (for this purpose), if such should be desired—and just as easy a “return” to Facebook (for this purpose), if that should be desired.
So why not do this? What is the reason? It can’t be technical, or a matter of competence, or effort; it is utterly inconceivable that—even if Eliezer himself can’t find the time, or doesn’t know how, to set up a blog—he cannot find someone competent and willing to do this for him. (I’d do it for free, and so would any number of other people!)
What’s the obstacle?
And to be clear, even if we need a swiss army knife I think FB is quite subpar as a swiss army knife and someone should be making a better one
It’s worth thinking about this analogy a bit more.
Consider this, for example: when, and why, do people need Swiss army knives? Actual ones, I mean. Certainly not for everyday uses, like “chop your vegetables when making dinner every night”, etc. Victorinox clearly does not intend their products to replace chef’s knives, yes?
But—speaking, still, of actual Swiss army knives—people do buy them, and use them. They are genuinely useful tools. Just… not as replacements for the proper tools for any given job, when those are available, and can be used.
So perhaps it’s worth having, say, an ability to use Facebook to invite people to an event, or the ability to post “blog posts” on Facebook, if we expect to encounter situations where the proper tools for those jobs are unavailable, or we find ourselves unable to use them. On the other hand, it seems like a clearly bad idea to plan on using Facebook as the primary tool for very job, forever, even when far superior tools exist, and we are perfectly capable of using those proper tools—just as it would be foolish, when stocking your home kitchen, to skip buying a chef’s knife, on account of you already having your Swiss army knife.
[1] And not all of it is “that goal is actually bad”! (Only some of it.)
As I said in my earlier comment, even if you want the sort of thing Eliezer says he wants, that’s entirely insufficient reason to make the choice he made. One would also have to not want all of the many advantages of choosing otherwise (i.e., posting on not-Facebook).
Let me emphasize again: for Eliezer’s choice to make sense, it is not enough to want the things he said. Neither does it suffice to want them more strongly than you want the other stuff I talked about, because it is not a tradeoff—at least, not in the sense that we have to trade off desirable features or advantages of one system against those of another system. The only costs are the up-front cognitive costs of considering the alternatives.
In order for Eliezer’s choice to make sense, one of the following seems to need to be true:
He has to not care at all about any of the advantages of not using Facebook as a primary host for one’s content.
He has to not have given any thought to the matter.
I do not have sufficient information to discriminate between these two possibilities. But I will say that #1 reflects much, much more poorly on Eliezer’s character than #2 does—which is why I assumed the latter to be the true answer.
There’s one major reason a blog will never be strictly superior to facebook: the dropoff rate for people clicking through to read your blog is large. (For example, I generally do not click through to read blogposts while scanning facebook – I only read whatever quotes people include on FB itself, and this is quite common).
People are not enacting the algorithm “scan FB, then click through to things and read them.” People are enacting the algorithm “scan and comment on FB.” The trivial inconvenience is huge.
If I want to comment on Eliezer’s blog, it’s worse: I have to sign up on that blog. And I also don’t trust most people people to have clicked through to read the comments on that blog because I know most people are only reading comments on Facebook. This happens quite frequently with rationalist blogs: all the substantive discussion ends up happening on the corresponding FB post, not on the blog itself.
(It’ll be necessary to sign up on the blog, since Eliezer specifically wants to be able to block people easily)
It’s noteworthy that Eliezer has multiple other blogs (OvercomingBias, LessWrong, and his own yudwosky.net, and a tumblr). He uses FB. I think it’s quite unlikely this is because he accidentally ended up on FB.
There’s one additional important feature FB has that most other blogs do not: casual feel. the textbox for entering things is small, the fontsize is small, the font is sans-serif and simple, the site is cluttered so your post doesn’t look like the most important thing on the page. All of these translate into a strong signal of “this is low effort and is not to be judged as a high effort thing.”
This is extremely important – it means I can actually get things written that I wouldn’t otherwise write. It’s hard to do with a dedicated blogsite (there may be wordpress themes that produce this effect)
There’s one major reason a blog will never be strictly superior to facebook: the dropoff rate for people clicking through to read your blog is large.
Cross-posting full text eliminates this disadvantage.
If I want to comment on Eliezer’s blog, it’s worse: I have to sign up on that blog. … (It’ll be necessary to sign up on the blog, since Eliezer specifically wants to be able to block people easily)
This is not true. Simply set up Facebook login for the blog; set that as the only available login method; and then block whoever you want.
Even if it were true, I did not say it was necessary to enable commenting on the blog; let people comment on Facebook only, if you like.
This happens quite frequently with rationalist blogs: all the substantive discussion ends up happening on the corresponding FB post, not on the blog itself.
While I do think this is bad, it does nothing whatever to reduce the advantages of posting the content itself on the blog.
It is also possible (and not very difficult at all, though not turnkey) to enable Facebook comments associated with a Facebook-shared blog post to also appear under your blog—thus letting people who comment on your blog, also see comments that other people have posted on Facebook.
[Eliezer] uses FB. I think it’s quite unlikely this is because he accidentally ended up on FB.
I agree that it’s unlikely that Eliezer accidentally ended up on Facebook. But I think it’s quite a bit more likely that Eliezer thoughtlessly ended up on Facebook—because he did not think about the tradeoffs, because he did not care to consider the pros and cons, because he made no attempt to search for better solutions. (And because no one else knew or cared enough to point them out to him.)
There’s one additional important feature FB has that most other blogs do not: casual feel. The textbox for entering things is small, the fontsize is small, the font is sans-serif and simple, the site is cluttered so your post doesn’t look like the most important thing on the page. All of these translate into a strong signal of “this is low effort and is not to be judged as a high effort thing.”
I am very skeptical of this sort of claim, truth be told. It feels very much like a post-hoc, just-so-story, sort of explanation. I do not expect the majority of such claims to survive rigorous testing.
But even if we accept what you say here, it is obviously easy enough to duplicate that effect by selecting an appropriate theme/layout for a blog. Once again, Eliezer Yudkowsky, of all people, is uniquely positioned to call upon a great quantity of technical and design talent to create bespoke solutions for him, for problems of this nature.
No, I don’t think that follows. One of the lessons of Inadequate Equilibria is that both individuals and groups get stuck in situations that are not “good enough” by any measure, simply because no individual has enough “free energy” to force a change to something better.
By this logic, p-values are “good enough” statistics, because the scientific community persists in using them, even though they clearly lead to non-reproducible studies. Selling lifesaving formula in one state and making it illegal to sell across state lines is “good enough” because no one has bothered to change the situation.
To me, Facebook is yet another Inadequate Equilibrium. We don’t use it because it’s good, we use it because that’s where we started out, and no one has enough pull in our community to force a global change. If someone manages to change it at a global level in the rationalist community, we would look back upon our usage of Facebook and wonder why we ever bothered to use such a terrible tool.
The relevant question here is “is there _currently_ an alternative, such that if everyone switched from FB to another thing at the same time, they’d all be better off?”. The context of the OP was “we built a tool by which people could all agree to switch from FB if and only if a bunch of other people switched from FB at once – why didn’t that work?”
And to that, I think there’s actually a pretty good case to be made that “no, there is not a good enough alternative to FB.” FB does a lot of things well – it can afford to because it’s a huge company and spends lots on R&D and fine-tuning itself.
The parts of FB that are bad are due to how it’s monetized and what incentives it has. Any alternative to FB would have to be monetized differently, or have to be (to some degree) altruistic project, or you’d have to have people making peace with a less polished project that didn’t have as much developer resources.
This doesn’t mean it can’t be done. (I think discord is actually monetized in a pretty reasonable way, where you get access to cooler emoji by paying $5/month while otherwise being free). But someone has to actually build it, and it requires a lot of effort.
I’ve looked at the attempts to build “open source aesthetic facebook” (that’s built from the ground up to leave the power with users rather than the monetization system). And… it was quite bad. Google+ might have been better, but I have no reason to assume Google+ would be any less evil than FB over the long term. (I think they couldn’t quite get away with being as evil initially since they had to tempt people away from FB).
To be honest, I think that if we start talking about “an alternative to Facebook” or “switching from Facebook to some other thing”, or “building a Facebook replacement”, we’re off to a bad start.
An analogy: suppose you have a Swiss army knife, which you use to chop vegetables, saw through wooden beams, trim your nails, etc. I observe that said tool is really quite sub-par. You ask me what I think is an alternative tool you should use. Should you switch from the Swiss army knife to some other thing? Do I have a Swiss army knife replacement to offer you?
No, of course not. It’s just that you should chop vegetables with a chef’s knife, saw through wooden beams with a saw, trim your nails with a nail trimmer, etc.
Now suppose I said this to you, and you replied: “A chef’s knife isn’t a Swiss army knife replacement! It doesn’t saw wood and it doesn’t trim my nails. A saw isn’t a Swiss army knife replacement! It doesn’t chop vegetables and it doesn’t trim my nails. A nail trimmer isn’t …”
You’d be missing the point, right?
Well… not really! That’s the thing; Facebook doesn’t really do a lot of things well. It does a lot of things, and it does some things well (probably; I have my doubts, but let’s grant it).
The better question, IMO (instead of those I list above) is: for each X, where X is something you use Facebook for, what should you use?
For some X, the answer will be “Facebook”.
For some other X, the answer will be “not Facebook; instead, [thing]”. The value of [thing] will not be the same for all X.
I do think the basic analogy you’re pointing at here is important to consider. Maybe FB should be split into it’s component parts. (And to be clear, even if we need a swiss army knife I think FB is quite subpar as a swiss army knife and someone should be making a better one, with the caveat that they need to actually address the incentives problem in a way that makes sense and I expect it to be a lot of work)
But much of FB’s value prop lies in having access to all of it’s userbase, to do various things with everyone I know, and have those things work in tandem. I can communicate with large or small groups that I want to communicate with, and invite them to events, and seamlessly blend between the two. Creating a userbase is hard, so there’s a strong benefit to swiss-army-ness.
Epistemic Status: Increasingly strained metaphor
I think FB is less like a crappy swiss army knife that doesn’t work properly, and more like a kitchen that doesn’t work. (Or rather, everything works, but the fridge and cabinets automatically restock themselves, and charges me when I take things out of it.… but they periodically move things around in the fridge to force me to bump into new things to take out and get charged for so I can impulse buy different things. (Supermarkets actually essentially do do this and it’s kinda annoying but less intrusive because it’s not my home that they’re re-arranging)).
This feature is undesirable to me and I want to fix it… and I could buy a new fridge, and a new cabinet, and all my own vegetables, etc. But buying any individual one of these means it has to live in a different kitchen that doesn’t come with all the rest of my stuff. I have to buy all the things in order for any of them to be nearly as useful. Which is quite expensive. [Also, I’d have to pay for them all (whereas the Auto-Wonder-Kitchen was free because it was running on weird product placement).]
Google has a similar set of products as FB, and does keep them a bit more distinct from each other. (i.e. you can use email to communicate with people, and calendar to invite them to events, and you can just use email and calendar in a way where you can’t just use any given segment of FB except for Messenger). And you get to re-use the same set of contacts in between google apps. But that segregation already has some issues (it’s not quit
But what Google doesn’t do (as well as FB) is basically provide ways to spam all your friends with stuff they might or might not be interested in, and make it easy-ish for them to opt into which collection of spam they want. (Google attempts to do this but has never really succeeded IMO). When I say I want a FB replacement, “spam almost exactly the right people” is basically the feature I want.
So, there’s definitely a lot to engage with, here, and I don’t think I could do justice to all of what you say in a single comment (in particular, I have a lot to say about the “spam all your friends with stuff they might or might not be interested in” thing[1]). Some scattered thoughts follow, with possibly more to come later…
So, in the world of your kitchen analogy, that does seem true. But in the real world, and talking about Facebook, it’s actually not true!
Here’s an example. Eliezer has, for some years now, been “blogging”, so to speak, on Facebook. This has always perplexed me. Oh, I can understand the sentiment of “access to all my friends” that you mention, sure. (I may disagree, but I understand the argument, even if I find it ultimately unconvincing.)
But that is an argument for posting things on Facebook, it is not an argument for hosting things on Facebook!
You see? Eliezer could have a blog! He could have a Wordpress blog (wordpress.com or self-hosted), or use any number of other blogging engines; and then, he could link or cross-post or “share” those blog posts on Facebook. (I trust I do not need to go over the technical, accessibility, openness, archival, control, and many other advantages of doing so.)
So here is a potential “move away from Facebook” that does not require a “different kitchen”, etc. It’s fully interoperable with the existing stuff; it offers great advantages; and it facilitates a future “total abandonment” of Facebook (for this purpose), if such should be desired—and just as easy a “return” to Facebook (for this purpose), if that should be desired.
So why not do this? What is the reason? It can’t be technical, or a matter of competence, or effort; it is utterly inconceivable that—even if Eliezer himself can’t find the time, or doesn’t know how, to set up a blog—he cannot find someone competent and willing to do this for him. (I’d do it for free, and so would any number of other people!)
What’s the obstacle?
It’s worth thinking about this analogy a bit more.
Consider this, for example: when, and why, do people need Swiss army knives? Actual ones, I mean. Certainly not for everyday uses, like “chop your vegetables when making dinner every night”, etc. Victorinox clearly does not intend their products to replace chef’s knives, yes?
But—speaking, still, of actual Swiss army knives—people do buy them, and use them. They are genuinely useful tools. Just… not as replacements for the proper tools for any given job, when those are available, and can be used.
So perhaps it’s worth having, say, an ability to use Facebook to invite people to an event, or the ability to post “blog posts” on Facebook, if we expect to encounter situations where the proper tools for those jobs are unavailable, or we find ourselves unable to use them. On the other hand, it seems like a clearly bad idea to plan on using Facebook as the primary tool for very job, forever, even when far superior tools exist, and we are perfectly capable of using those proper tools—just as it would be foolish, when stocking your home kitchen, to skip buying a chef’s knife, on account of you already having your Swiss army knife.
[1] And not all of it is “that goal is actually bad”! (Only some of it.)
Eliezer has mentioned his reasons for moving to Facebook.
Having read said comment [working link], I stand behind my “thoughtlessly” hypothesis, which seems to have been entirely on-target.
Um, huh? That comments looks to me like the “Eliezer wants a very different thing than Said wants” hypothesis.
As I said in my earlier comment, even if you want the sort of thing Eliezer says he wants, that’s entirely insufficient reason to make the choice he made. One would also have to not want all of the many advantages of choosing otherwise (i.e., posting on not-Facebook).
Let me emphasize again: for Eliezer’s choice to make sense, it is not enough to want the things he said. Neither does it suffice to want them more strongly than you want the other stuff I talked about, because it is not a tradeoff—at least, not in the sense that we have to trade off desirable features or advantages of one system against those of another system. The only costs are the up-front cognitive costs of considering the alternatives.
In order for Eliezer’s choice to make sense, one of the following seems to need to be true:
He has to not care at all about any of the advantages of not using Facebook as a primary host for one’s content.
He has to not have given any thought to the matter.
I do not have sufficient information to discriminate between these two possibilities. But I will say that #1 reflects much, much more poorly on Eliezer’s character than #2 does—which is why I assumed the latter to be the true answer.
There’s one major reason a blog will never be strictly superior to facebook: the dropoff rate for people clicking through to read your blog is large. (For example, I generally do not click through to read blogposts while scanning facebook – I only read whatever quotes people include on FB itself, and this is quite common).
People are not enacting the algorithm “scan FB, then click through to things and read them.” People are enacting the algorithm “scan and comment on FB.” The trivial inconvenience is huge.
If I want to comment on Eliezer’s blog, it’s worse: I have to sign up on that blog. And I also don’t trust most people people to have clicked through to read the comments on that blog because I know most people are only reading comments on Facebook. This happens quite frequently with rationalist blogs: all the substantive discussion ends up happening on the corresponding FB post, not on the blog itself.
(It’ll be necessary to sign up on the blog, since Eliezer specifically wants to be able to block people easily)
It’s noteworthy that Eliezer has multiple other blogs (OvercomingBias, LessWrong, and his own yudwosky.net, and a tumblr). He uses FB. I think it’s quite unlikely this is because he accidentally ended up on FB.
There’s one additional important feature FB has that most other blogs do not: casual feel. the textbox for entering things is small, the fontsize is small, the font is sans-serif and simple, the site is cluttered so your post doesn’t look like the most important thing on the page. All of these translate into a strong signal of “this is low effort and is not to be judged as a high effort thing.”
This is extremely important – it means I can actually get things written that I wouldn’t otherwise write. It’s hard to do with a dedicated blogsite (there may be wordpress themes that produce this effect)
Cross-posting full text eliminates this disadvantage.
This is not true. Simply set up Facebook login for the blog; set that as the only available login method; and then block whoever you want.
Even if it were true, I did not say it was necessary to enable commenting on the blog; let people comment on Facebook only, if you like.
While I do think this is bad, it does nothing whatever to reduce the advantages of posting the content itself on the blog.
It is also possible (and not very difficult at all, though not turnkey) to enable Facebook comments associated with a Facebook-shared blog post to also appear under your blog—thus letting people who comment on your blog, also see comments that other people have posted on Facebook.
I agree that it’s unlikely that Eliezer accidentally ended up on Facebook. But I think it’s quite a bit more likely that Eliezer thoughtlessly ended up on Facebook—because he did not think about the tradeoffs, because he did not care to consider the pros and cons, because he made no attempt to search for better solutions. (And because no one else knew or cared enough to point them out to him.)
I am very skeptical of this sort of claim, truth be told. It feels very much like a post-hoc, just-so-story, sort of explanation. I do not expect the majority of such claims to survive rigorous testing.
But even if we accept what you say here, it is obviously easy enough to duplicate that effect by selecting an appropriate theme/layout for a blog. Once again, Eliezer Yudkowsky, of all people, is uniquely positioned to call upon a great quantity of technical and design talent to create bespoke solutions for him, for problems of this nature.
By the way:
Something seems to be missing here?