Comment by desipis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by desipis | Hacker News Reader

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> The core issue is the underlying system that values engagement over all things ... the advertising system.

I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the business model. It's the technology.

We've invented technology that can, to a significant degree, control people. It is as addictive as hard drugs and people will just keep coming back to their dealer for more and more digital crack.

But it's worse than simply heroin or crack cocaine. It gives the dealers not just the power to keep people coming back for more, but also gives them far, far more control over not just what those people do, but what those people think.

The large companies (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc) aren't in the business of search or social media. Nor are they in the business of advertisement. Their business model is selling complete control over people at the population level. At some point it will stop being a business model and start being a self sustaining model of raw power that strips us of our humanity.

We need to take a hard stance to all attempts at psychological manipulation via technology. A/B testing to see how changes affect behaviour should be seen as morally repugnant as selling crack cocaine to children.

> I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the business model. It's the technology.

I don't think you're digging deep enough here. It's not the technology. It's the people. Meaning not just the people running companies, but all of us.

Technology is a tool. Any tool can be used for nefarious purposes, or for beneficial purposes. Which kind it gets used for depends on the people who use it, and on the people who are creating the environment in which the people using the tools operate.

I don't dispute that most of the people who are running large companies (not even limited to social media companies) are amoral and will do anything to make more money, including manipulating other people's thoughts and opinions. But such people can only thrive in an environment where there are lots of other people who are susceptible to their manipulation. There will always be nefarious people in the world. But there is no rule that says there have to be enough other people who are susceptible to them to enable them to thrive.

I don't disagree that people who make money through lies and manipulation should be punished. But I think we all need to take a step back and ask why such people are able to thrive in our society to this extent. At some point the rest of society needs to take some responsibility for not being susceptible to liars and crooks.

These are the same word games that got us tired arguments like "guns don't kill people, people kill people." Looking only at people as individuals limits you to seeing first-order effects. The insidious effects of social media come about because large scale algorithmic optimization has found high leverage points for influencing society. While that's ultimately a consequence of individual people, you can't solve many complicated problems using a lens that can't see higher-order effects.

People seem to be fundamentally incompatible with social media, much in the same way they're incompatible with bullet wounds and drug addictions. Blame-passing word games just get us farther from taking that truth and starting to fix the world.

> Looking only at people as individuals limits you to seeing first-order effects.

Where did I say "looking only at people as individuals"? My point was precisely the opposite: that people are not just individuals, that an individual person's failure to exercise common sense and critical thinking skills, making them susceptible to manipulation, when aggregated over a large enough segment of society, has higher order effects that go way beyond the consequences of the manipulation of that individual person, because it creates an environment where nefarious people can thrive, which is bad for everyone.

Social media technology certainly makes that problem worse by giving the nefarious people more leverage. But you can't fix the problem by banning or restricting the technology; the nefarious people will always have the means to control how those rules get written so that they can continue doing what they want to do, just with different labels pasted over it to satisfy the letter of the rules. Just as has happened with past attempts to do the same thing.

> People seem to be fundamentally incompatible with social media

You are assuming that there is no way for anyone to use the tool of social media without being an addict. That is as false and pernicious an assumption as the corresponding assumptions in the case of guns and drugs, which you are also making.

With that false assumption taken away, your argument boils down to: since some people are incapable of using tools like social media, guns, and drugs responsibly, we have to ban, or at least impose draconian restrictions on, those technologies for all people. That kind of thinking is incompatible with a free society. In a free society, you penalize the people who can't act like responsible adults, not the people who can.

> In a free society, you penalize the people who can't act like responsible adults, not the people who can.

If the ills of social media are, as you say, (and I also believe), caused by the higher-order effects of many individuals "failing to exercise common sense and critical thinking," then who are we to punish?

A phenomenon like QAnon might have been started by a single nefarious person, and amplified by a small group of misinformation lovers, but it's only because of social media's leverage that millions of people have had their moral framework and way of interacting with the world corrupted so heavily.

Punishing the irresponsible was a reasonable solution for all of history where the irresponsible had a reasonable amount of societal leverage. We're no longer there.

Perhaps banning social media isn't the way. But focusing on the humans that find leverage points in the system to amplify bad messages also doesn't solve the fact that the system is designed to maximize ordinary people's ability to create self-sustaining societal doom loops.

Banning guns might be overreach. But banning something that's the functional equivalent of distributing assault rifles to millions of toddlers seems like a necessity in a free society.

> who are we to punish?

I didn't say "punish", I said "penalize". Responsible adults should not have to have their society ruined because irresponsible people are manipulating and other irresponsible people are being manipulated.

> it's only because of social media's leverage

But what causes the leverage? It isn't just social media; if a billion people read on Facebook that they should drink nail polish to immunize themselves against COVID-19 (to concoct a fictional, as far as I know, example), and they do it, they suffer the consequences, not me.

What causes the leverage is that we have continued to hand more and more power to governments in the name of "fixing" problems that governments cannot fix. The result is that capturing that government power is worth so much that nefarious people are willing to spend billions to do it. Social media gives those people more leverage, yes, but if that big gob of centralized power wasn't there in the first place, it wouldn't matter.

Your proposed solution doesn't fix that problem; it makes it worse, by giving government even more power. And that just means responsible people get more penalized for the behavior of irresponsible people, because you're giving the government more power to ban tools that responsible people can make responsible use of.

> the system is designed to maximize ordinary people's ability to create self-sustaining societal doom loops

No, the system is designed to maximize the amount of power that nefarious people can capture, by centralizing that power. The solution is to de-centralize that power so it isn't there to capture. Stop depending on government fiat to fix problems.

What are your proposals? How do we make the masses of people less susceptible to this kind of manipulation? Without using the tools of government.

> How do we make the masses of people less susceptible to this kind of manipulation? Without using the tools of government.

I don't know how to solve the problem for everybody. I know how I solve it for myself: by using common sense and critical thinking, combined with a lot of background knowledge from a lot of different sources. But I don't know how to magically make everyone do that. And even people who do that won't always agree; many of the questions we would all like answers to do not have simple answers that everyone can agree on. People have different goals and values and they aren't always fully compatible, and we don't have a good understanding of many important problem domains.

What I do know is that the problem is unfixable with the tools of government. So we have no choice but to look for other, non-government ways of fixing it.

> Their business model is selling complete control over people at the population level. At some point it will stop being a business model and start being a self sustaining model of raw power that strips us of our humanity.

Calling it "complete control" is absurd hyperbole ans ignores that psychological manipulation isn't even remotely new. In fact the goddamned politicians implicitly called upon to ban this are psychological manipulators already. So were televangalists, every theocrat and strongman who suppressed dissent enough that his victims were stockholmed.

It cannot strip us of humanity - although it would be a good thing if it could because "humanity" in that context is a collection of bugs exploited for evil.

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