kill-procrustes

There's a line from a show I like: "I figure there are always going to be reasons not to do something. If you really want to do it, then you have to do it."

It sound simplistic but honestly, this happens in life. I feel for the author as someone in the same situation (left academia for industry). But at some point it is what it is. You can't change reality. You can't reverse time. So in every moment you just have to decide, "Given the world is this way, what do I want to do?" The world is going to continue on day after day and is not going to stop or fundamentally alter itself to align with your preferences and well-being. All you get is the choice.

I consider them a scapegoat in the sense that they're sort of a catchall target for negative feelings about these problems. I also think they're not a scapegoat insofar as they're responsible for their actual bad practices. It's not really either-or for me: they're blamed for things they really are responsible for, but I also think they catch a lot of flak in general for things that are largely beyond their control. I'd like them to be accountable for the bad things they actually do while keeping our eye on the broader problem, which I'm not as convinced as you are that everyone is doing already.

I'm not suggesting "blaming" ourselves, per se. Sitting around and wallowing in our own guilt won't accomplish anything. But I do think we should accept that our own nature is part of what has led to this and be honest about the problem. I couldn't have put it better than you did: we should think about how to support humans as they are.

I'm not sure what I said is a straw man. I was being a little flip, but I think it's a normal human impulse to blame "that thing" or "those people" and to feel that a problem can be fixed by just eliminating whatever that is. Maybe nobody is explicitly saying "if we eliminate Facebook the problem will go away," but I do think some people implicitly feel that way.

The deeper problem, in my view, is that network technologies encourage our tendencies toward runaway group think and villainization due to their effect of disinhibition (making us react to something more quickly than we can rationally think about it).

I'm no fan of Facebook, and I think they've made a lot of unethical decisions, but I also feel like they're becoming this massive scapegoat for the social discomfort caused by the giant mirror that information technology has held up to human nature. Yes, the algorithms have had some horrifying effects, and yes, they have intentionally engineered their products to be addictive, and they deserve to be criticized and punished for those behaviors, but we also need to take a hard look at ourselves and admit that some of this is a consequence of the darker corners of the human heart. It's not like we didn't have holy wars and genocide before Facebook. To some degree we are all complicit in this problem. I'm not trying to be a defeatist and say that we shouldn't try to improve things, but if we adopt this attitude of "let's just abolish the tech giants and everything will be great," we're letting ourselves off the hook and I believe that our unwillingness to face the deeper problem will prevent it from being solved.

This is a classic problem of "who decides?" Unlike malware, lots of things initially written off as misinformation turn out to be true. I'm not going to argue that YouTube doesn't have a legal right to do what they're doing, but assuming that they're specially knowledgeable about truth and falsity strikes me as an incredible act of hubris.

All of that said, I recognize that disinformation and misinformation is a serious and tricky problem. I think the American right partially has themselves to blame for throwing so much mud at the wall. I understand YouTube not wanting to be hijacked and used as a political vehicle. But at the end of the day they function as a commons, and I think society is worse off when they censor content like this.

I'm pretty sure being critical of efforts to censor information is part of the hacker ethos ("information should be free").

I think this is actually why the Twitter approach ("some or all of this tweet is disputed") is a good way to go. You're providing more information—links to people who disagree—rather than hiding information.

This is a really underrated point. This whole site is really "tech industry news" with some hacking sprinkled in, but its name at least is based on the idea of the hacker ethos. That whole thing about decentralization, distrusting authority, information being free? A curiosity for how things work and logical investigation rather than letting someone else do your thinking for you? Disinformation is a huge problem and I understand the impulse to grab for the easiest available solution, but this is fool's gold and anathema to what hackers and Western democracies claim are the foundations of their belief system.

This is the exact same thing as applying a label. Even if someone who disagrees with you does "need to grow," telling them that is a pretty surefire way to get them to write you off. If you actually want to convince and persuade people, you have to meet them where they are. That's the hard work in a democracy, and it can be frustrating and infuriating to see the pain that some people suffer because of the ignorance of others, but that's the way this country is supposed to work—through persuasion and conversation. We've tried lots of other methods of government and social structure throughout history and none of them has done better.

I was just discussing this thread with a friend of mine and we agreed on the same thing. Taleb has a line about college being the closest thing to a natural social state in the Western world. I think our brains feel comfortable in some sort of regular, persistent social milieu, particularly one formed by close friends/family. We expect some sort of tribe to be around us. That doesn't mean some of us aren't introverts—I definitely am one—but as I get older the absence of my friend group constantly there in the background is really painful.

That's pretty much a perfect summation of the theory of evolution.