aero-deck

Cowardice.

engaging w/ someone is different from discoursing with them. "engagement" is what social media companies say they provide - but really they just offer "discourse".

> the public's inability to engage with epistemological problems on systemic scales

The public's inability? What about everyone's inability. No one deals well with epistemological problems on a systematic scale, not even the technologists who delude themselves into thinking that they're driving anything.

I am exactly talking about psychological limits. The difference is that I don't think the psychological limits of the creators are any different from those of the users. If anything, I think the creators are more psychologically limited than the users. This is because the creators need to explain to themselves why they are creating the thing - everyone else just puts up with it. When you say ppl will either be duped or completely check out of discourse, don't forget about yourself.

Also, of course I didn't read the article....

dunno what "TFA" refers to here, but it seems like we're heading into a argument regarding epistemology, which is not a discussion that HN handles well.

IMO "truth" is distraction here because what is at stake here are people's values, not their understanding of math and physics. When people worry about "post-truth", they're worried about liberal values no longer being the unquestioned default. It is absolutely a marketplace, and if people switching marketplaces en-masse makes it harder to launch rockets and develop vaccines, then it probably means those activities are making people net unhappy. People are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, even the dumb ones.

We want an an appropriate degree of emotional engagement with discourse, which is 1-1 with how much discourse is happening. People being too angry is caused by people discoursing too much and vice-versa. There are opposite problems associated w/ too little discourse, but we don't suffer from those.

Things are hyper-polarized right now and there is no magic political synthesis that is right over the horizon if only we could just keep discoursing a little bit more. This is like a heroin addict thinking they'll cease being addicted after that last fix. The solution is to cool things down.

Because there are actually multiple "arenas of discourse" and people will simply switch the "marketplace" they're using.

It's technocratic hubris to think that there is just a single such arena and that all the others are illegitimate/dangerous.

right - like how the stock market behaves nowadays w/ quant traders - which then motivated people to construct darkpools of liquidity where the real trading happens.

No one has ever cared about factual accuracy except for the military. All other social benefits of "facts" trickle-down from there.

The chilling effect may actually be a good thing, given that discourse these days is overheated.

There's a weird magic trick that social media companies have played on people to convince them that the text and images consumed on their websites are socially/culturally/politically relevant. Once it becomes clear how easy it is to fake that text people will come to understand how cheap and irrelevant "opinion" has become and this magic trick will become weakened.

Tech can start out as an extension, but what people fail to understand is that it can become slowly become autonomous over time, kinda like how a party gets out of control and people start putting holes in walls.

I think technologists rarely, if ever, talk about this because a lot of what enables our blind pursuit of technology is to say that technology must be an extension of humans and so it can never become autonomous. When ppl talk about AGI and paperclip maximizers, I think it's a way of pushing the problem far into the horizon and ignoring that the boundary is fluid and pushing.

Imagine if all the people at Google and Facebook stopped thinking that they're making the world a better place?

It's really arrogant to think that any argument for a moratorium must be based in lack of information.

all the correct observations about averages aside, quantity!=quality

and we're just soooo much smarter nowadays than we were 1000 years ago...

Denial of what? That AI is as important as AI-fans think that it is?

This is list of ways that Pope Francis behaved differently from how a narrow section of catholics would prefer for him to act. Sucks that catholicism seems to be too difficult for people to swallow. There is always a temptation to dumb the message down, but that should be resisted.