If you look at my posting history, you’ll see that all posts I’ve made on LW (two!) are negative toward social media and one calls out recommender systems explicitly. This post has made me reconsider some of my beliefs, thank you.
I realized that, while I have heard Tristan Harris, read The Attention Merchants, and perused other, similar sources, I haven’t looked for studies or data to back it all up. It makes sense on a gut level—that these systems can feed carefully curated information to softly steer a brain toward what the algorithm is optimizing for—but without more solid data, I found I can’t quite tell if this is real or if it’s just “old man yells at cloud.”
Subjectively, I’ve seen friends and family get sucked into social media and change into more toxic versions of themselves. Or maybe they were always assholes, and social media just lent them a specific, hivemind kind of flavor, which triggered my alarms? Hard to say.
Subjectively, I’ve seen friends and family get sucked into social media and change into more toxic versions of themselves. Or maybe they were always assholes, and social media just lent them a specific, hivemind kind of flavor, which triggered my alarms? Hard to say.
Fwiw, I am a lot more compelled by the general story “we are now seeing examples of bad behavior from the ‘other’ side that are selected across hundreds of millions of people, instead of thousands of people; our intuitions are not calibrated for this” (see e.g. here). That issue seems like a consequence of more global reach + more recording of bad stuff that happens. Though if I were planning to make it my career I would spend way more time figuring out whether that story is true as well.
If you look at my posting history, you’ll see that all posts I’ve made on LW (two!) are negative toward social media and one calls out recommender systems explicitly. This post has made me reconsider some of my beliefs, thank you.
I realized that, while I have heard Tristan Harris, read The Attention Merchants, and perused other, similar sources, I haven’t looked for studies or data to back it all up. It makes sense on a gut level—that these systems can feed carefully curated information to softly steer a brain toward what the algorithm is optimizing for—but without more solid data, I found I can’t quite tell if this is real or if it’s just “old man yells at cloud.”
Subjectively, I’ve seen friends and family get sucked into social media and change into more toxic versions of themselves. Or maybe they were always assholes, and social media just lent them a specific, hivemind kind of flavor, which triggered my alarms? Hard to say.
Thanks, that’s good to hear.
Fwiw, I am a lot more compelled by the general story “we are now seeing examples of bad behavior from the ‘other’ side that are selected across hundreds of millions of people, instead of thousands of people; our intuitions are not calibrated for this” (see e.g. here). That issue seems like a consequence of more global reach + more recording of bad stuff that happens. Though if I were planning to make it my career I would spend way more time figuring out whether that story is true as well.