I’ve abandoned a well known website that users post video to, begins with Y. Just could not live with the automated overlord.
The crunch time (for me) happened when a well known scientist posted a video debunking another video by someone that was pushing crackpot theories urging people not to wear masks because they caused hypoxic injury (and various other dangerous misinformation regarding the pandemic). The scientist worked through all the claims of the crackpot, even wearing a mask while measuring his blood oxygen levels. This well known video social media site took down the scientists debunk, while leaving the crackpot video up.
Rational discourse be damned, just rely on a robot eh?
I use the same website without trouble. I paused the history and search history and spent a bit of effort training it to not recommend crap. I’m not saying there isn’t a problem, there certainly is. But it’s still possible for me to enjoy it.
I could agree with an argument to abandon the site on ethical grounds. Looking closer at that, however, I saw that the website is still a net loser for its owners. They’re spending money to keep the service running. The economics therefore make it ethically more responsible to keep using it (while skipping or muting all their stupid ads) than to boycott, from my point of view.
The net loss for its owners, depends on what they get out of it doesn’t it?.. could be really good value for money for them, what then? Anyway, that’s me done with the big tube.
Google made an entire browser, Chrome, and invested enough time and effort for Chrome to overtake the other major browsers with the end goal that more people will see their ads if browsing is better. YouTube is a captive audience (you are the product) which is why Google keeps it going. They get all the information they need about you to better target you with ads and to better sell ad space. Don’t believe they run it as a charity for users or content creators. They do it because it’s a good business model.
I got the whole public engagement with science thing out of my system, at least for the time being. A couple of years back I was jumping on misinformation about climate change and whatnot almost as a reflex. In fact it goes back more than twenty years, to when I was inspired by Carl Sagan’s great book, The Demon-Haunted World, to try to help avoid the diminishing of the public discourse that Sagan foresaw so clearly. I did my bit, and in the end I decided it was time to retire and enjoy myself (which I had honestly forgotten about for a long time). I even stopped engaging on Twitter about a year ago. It was very good for my health. I have reluctantly conceded to Voltaire’s injunction that “il faut cultiver nôtre jardin.”
During my time of engagement Sagan’s worst fears were exceeded, and I mostly blame the advance of the internet. The factors are numerous and complex, and in many ways the internet has improved the world. But we have lost access to an agreed set of facts, and I don’t know how I can fight that.
All of us are guilty of being cognitively lazy, and I was including myself in the context of being lazy and stupid. The internet has improved the lot of being human, by something that’s quite inhuman ironically.
I find that people just switch off when the S word is mentioned. It’s better just to get them to ask why, just like kids do.
To think that we ‘grow up’ and stop asking that question…
I know this makes me an old git, but I remember when the WWW was invented, pre ad flood. Recently, in the last few years at least, search results have a different flavour to them, more commercial stuff… more difficult to get to the source of something, just endless copies of copies everyone re-posting with the same ads following you around.
I spent a number of years on Wikipedia, and I still think it’s one of the greatest things to come out of the WWW. Wikipedia is really excellent on science and mathematics, even if it’s flaky on a lot of other stuff.
I even made a good faith attempt to engage with the notoriously biased Conservapedia. It was possible to write innocuous articles about, say, the film Lincoln and the Union Chapel in London.
Attempting to write about anything more contentious, though, was useless.
But at least it isn’t commercial stuff. These are real people writing according to a coherent point of view. Mostly Andrew Schlafly and a few of his friends.
It is my go to source for science stuff, or at least the beginnings of something. It is really usefully cross linked, you can usually drill down and find the thing you want fairly easily even if you don’t know the name of it.
In the beginning was Phyllis Schlafly. The founder of Conservapedia, one of Phyllis’s sons Andrew, created it when his attempts to write creationist propaganda into Wikipedia articles were unsuccessful.
Schlafly was a contemporary of Barack Obama at Harvard Law School. He has belittled the former President, who graduated magna cum laude, as an “affirmative action candidate.”
Ah but here I’m reverting back into the Wikipedian obsessive I used to be.
Thought it looked a bit thin on the ground, I’ve never understood having a ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ (or whatever) political point of view / philosophy. Strikes me as locking ones self into one point on a compass. It would explain why I find it hard to pick anyone to vote for. Seems that some people have the views they have, because they have to have those views. Mm… far too many haves in that last bit.
I think, wether consciously or not, that’s exactly the point to a lot of people. Not having to think too hard on an ongoing basis. Can’t say there aren’t areas where I behave that way.
I usually find myself considerably to the left of most political parties. For electoral purposes, though, there has only been one viable party for me to vote for in Britain under our voting system. In any case I’ve never lived for long in a constituency where the outcome was in doubt. I don’t like living far from the shops or public transport.
I obviously find myself in constant vehement disagreement with the British government of whichever hue on many issues of great import, but I have learned to take consolation from what I perceive as a slow and very patchy but overall quite beneficial change in public social attitudes which feed into public policy.
I think most people who aren’t involved in party politics are probably in the same boat (or a similar boat facing in a different direction.) Politics is about compromise, but parties are forced to campaign in such a way as to maximize their bargaining power. This leads to the paradox that politicians find compromise quite difficult to sell to their supporters.
That’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one who feels like this. Compromise is the way my mind works, having come from a very large family, it’s one thing you have to get used to.
Unfortunately it’s the algorithm that’s set up to encourage revenue growth and disinformation seems to make money.
Check out some of the stuff written by Guillaume Chaslot, he is an ex Google Engineer who worked on the recommendation AI in the early days.
He’s now an advocate and campaigner of AI for good. Even he doesn’t fully know how it works and Google aren’t bothered as it continues to generate growth and income.
Scary stuff tbf as an AI doesn’t have any ethics, just set of goals it needs to achieve. It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until the current funding models for online services remove the need to generate revenue.
Compromise is the way my mind works, having come from a very large family, it’s one thing you have to get used to.