Scapegoating the Algorithm(asteriskmag.com) |
Scapegoating the Algorithm(asteriskmag.com) |
Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it.
Phase One: 1770s
The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, but it was anti-hereditary elite. Thomas Paine writes Common Sense. Not just your uncle's holiday rant, but part of Scottish Realism. "Self-evident" meant truths visible to anyone, no credentials required.
Phase Two: 1820s–1830s
Jacksonian democracy recasts the conflict: common man vs. entrenched elites in law, banking, and bureaucracy. Aristocracy = lawyers, bankers, judges. Clergy = newspapers and journalists. Populist epistemology: trust your own judgment; they're out of touch.
Phase Three: Mid-20th Century
Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus. Main Street is now the beacon of folk wisdom.
Phase Four: 2000s
Old media's monopoly dies. The internet gives Main Street a megaphone as loud as any newsroom. The Reformation comes again. Swap religion for epistemology, the printing press for the internet. When the epistemic monopoly falls, chaos follows until a new regime of knowledge stabilizes.
Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option. Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime, or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize. Pick one. Then ask yourself what that choice means for what happens next.
> Let's face it, putting the genie back in the bottle isn't an option.
The genie might be where it's always been, just a few new smokes and mirrors added for laughs and giggles.
> Either we reconstitute the aristocracy under a new, still-undefined regime or we solve the class problem so there's no aristocracy left to legitimize.
"We" being like who? And "aristocracy" is who?
You lost me at Phase 3 because scientists, engineers, policy wonks don't fit any definition of aristocracy. Phase 4 didn't offer new candidates for coronation, so what gives? Are you fomenting a revolution against said scientists, engineers and policy wonks? That's curious to put it mildly.
But is it solvable? What if the desire to have somebody else to blame is stronger than any desire for freedom and equality? You want freedom, I want freedom, but does the average man want freedom if it is truly offered him?
> Aristocracy (from Ancient Greek ἀριστοκρατίᾱ (aristokratíā) 'rule of the best'; from ἄριστος (áristos) 'best' and κράτος (krátos) 'power, strength') is a form of government that places power in the hands of a small, privileged ruling class, the aristocrats. [1]
It seems plain to me that in no sense have "scientists, engineers, policy wonks" been the "privileged ruling class" in the USA.
Senators and presidents and the executives and board members of multinational corporations and other large institutions are the "elite ruling class" you're looking for, and they're not scientists and engineers and academics...
EDIT: meh. At least aristocracies typically had a connection with the people and tended to not openly attack them or their culture.
> Our research is dedicated to ensuring AI is a force for good and it’s structured in a series of research programmes that cover a wide range of projects. Our work explores vital questions about the risks and opportunities emerging with AI in the near, mid- and long-term. These range from algorithmic transparency and the nature of intelligence to automated warfare, consciousness, social AI, feminist AI, AI-amplified injustice, global and pluriversal design, and the implications of AI for democracy, geopolitics, and the natural environment.
The meat of their argument, in my opinion, relies on this:
> Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the balance of empirical evidence in this area does not support the claim that social media use has a large impact on users’ political attitudes and behavior.
One such study they provide as a strong representative of the empirical evidence was by researchers collaborating with Meta where they did an RCT to test whether reverse-chronological vs ml algorithm feeds resulted int different political beliefs. I haven't looked into the study, but on its face that's an insanely stupid design; if my youtube feed became only reverse chronological one day I'd just open a different app after 40 seconds.
Content platforms' main product is their behavior-modulating feeds, their ability to hold your eyes for 4 hours a day. The idea that this wouldn't be effecting our politics is insane.
Things seem a lot dumber since social media, but I guess it is possible that the same dumbness is just being broadcast wider now that there aren’t any gatekeepers, I guess.
The author is wrong about psychology: people are generally not savvy information consumers. They mostly converge on the average of what they see around them. Cult leaders use this to their advantage by removing people from family and non-biased sources of information. The human brain acclimates and it's hard to break away from that situation epistemically.
Advertising generally works and is well measured. The process of selling people Coke or Pepsi is not fundamentally different from selling them on political ideas. And in practice many leaders have found it to be of practical utility to strengthen their power with a socially promoted ideology, whether that's religion in ancient times or state religion during the Soviet era or conspiracy theories in the current era.
I'd like to see people who are skeptical of the power of propaganda tackle these issues. They tend to cite a handful of reports claiming that propaganda was ineffective in 2016, but those reports were not well done and some members of the intelligence community have publicly stated that foreign influence was decisive in the 2016 election. The official reports that I'm aware of deliberately made no assessment of the impact on the election results.
If one believes that such influence is not effective, then one would have a harder time explaining why we're seeing more countries copy the Russian model. Clearly their militaries believe that it is effective. And one would also have a hard time explaining why the US engages in similar tactics abroad, including promoting anti-vax content in China.
Anyway, I see why people make the sort of argument the author is making. But it doesn't seem psychologically plausible or empirically correct. And it spreads the meme that consuming propaganda 24 hours a day isn't bad for you
-Superfastmatt
"X percent of Americans agree with the statement 'vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent', which shows America has completely lost the ability to agree on basic facts, everyone is living in a different reality, and this explains why they will not agree with the following specific correct views: [...]."
The reader is positioned such that if he does not agree with the specific "rational" views enumerated, he feels himself included in a group believing specific other, "irrational" things stated as the basic problem. The article becomes an instance of the problem it attempts to locate.
But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in arguably corrupt behavior as long as benefits outweigh costs.
Google, by pioneering an internet based on advertising, shifted the allocation of the collective Internet-capital toward producing content that is engaging. You tell me if engagement correlates with truthfulness or long term utility (it doesn't). Google -- though yes initially useful and even utility-generating -- would ultimately extract all the useful latent value (including any surplus it had added) from the internet. We are left with a very high entropy internet, where you are far more likely to find factually incorrect or simply worthless content (noise) than useful content (signal). (Though, yes, bastions of order do still exist, like wikipedia.)
Social media (facebook) simply did the same but instead of the broad internet, focused on extraction of value from interpersonal relationships. The result there, too, has not been good.
So is the internet / social media different? Yes and no. The degree of concentration of power, potential for manipulation, and general capacity to shape the world is much greater in these companies. Whatever trends existed previously have been substantially accelerated. These companies have means to influence nearly every aspect of life. That is not something that magazines, radio, nor (untargeted) television could accomplish.
Moreover, given their substantial power, companies like Goog and FB are more capable of altering the fabric of values that might otherwise have resisted change; i.e., they have accelerated the decline of institutions that would have otherwise favored truth, community, etc.
America's "large scale epistemic challenges" are exactly that: our society and institutions are increasingly devoid of concern for what truth is. There aren't "right" answers to every problem, but to have a debate, there has to be some set of values against which to measure consequences, and good faith commitment to a framework to measure. That's a notion of "truth", and we have mostly lost that.
Social media makes zero epistemic commitments, except whether a marginal dollar is earned. Though it is not the only problem, if your society were overrun by drug dealers turning people into mindless zombies, you might realize that it's hard to fix anything until you expel the drug dealers.
This author -- at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence -- likely wants to use algorithms for democracy; i.e., his group has the new miracle pill to fix your ill.
Sure, we all understand that biases exist and perfect objectivity can never be achieved. But today schools and newsrooms teach journalism as advocacy for causes and effecting change, and no longer even aim for objectivity.
Are we really surprised or disappointed that people finally figured out that they're being preached to, not informed, by most modern "journalism?"
What is worse they admit it, even have systems for correcting errors publicly, so all those mistakes really get pushed in all our faces.
Meanwhile the boutique/ideology/personality/opinion based media...
Errors, even lies, happen, but they are negligible compared to the most powerful tool of propaganda: cherrypicking. E.g. the otherwise thorough NYT reporting on air traffic controller shortages [1] entirely omitted the FAA diversity hiring scandal that disqualified applicants with top grades if they weren't diverse enough [2]. During COVID, the credible experts were happily making models of how many deaths a motorcycle rally caused [3], but when it came time to do the same for BLM, we instead got "Protest Is a Profound Public Health Intervention" [4]. This is not an outlier - social scientists have been turning a blind eye to results they dislike since at least 1985 [5].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/business/air-traffic-cont...
[2] https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-fa...
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7753804/
[4] https://time.com/5848212/doctors-supporting-protests/
[5] The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not. - from https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi..., citing the study "Human subjects review, personal values, and the regulation of social science research.": https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001
Advertising on TV cost tens of thousands of dollars and requires great effort, magazines and billboards a bit less on both fronts. But advertising on social media costs as little as you want, and these platforms are constantly asking business owners to throw in $20 or $50 to advertise. And when the business owner does so, Meta will give them completely fake statistics of how 40 000 people saw their ad. What does it matter that nobody clicked the ad and nobody purchased the product? Meta says right here that the ad was very effective. People love to gamble, and Facebook ads are nothing but a form of gambling for (usually small) business owners. "Sales have been slow this month, what if..." And since the barrier to spending on ads is so low, millions of people will take the bait. Add in the factor that advertisers can choose from hundreds of parameters to target the ads, and they feel like it's a skill they can train to win - hey it's just like sports betting!
Or somebody with a business or an executive has hired their niece to take care of "social media presence" for the company. Of course she is going to say that the ads she is buying on Meta are working great. Her job depends on it! Dito for outsourcing this to a third party that takes care of social media advertising. Of course they're going to give you phony presentations on how well their ads are working.
So it's not that the ads are working. It's a simple casino, and ad purchasers are the suckers.
Except for the 50%+ ads on Instagram which are outright scams and frauds. They probably bring in a lot of money to the advertisers.
Maybe if there was a social safety net, people would feel more comfortable choosing options that pay less. My soul has a pretty low price since I value security over abstract morality.
My main objective is not to critique that decision, but rather to argue that a society dedicated to the pursuit of dollars is likely to find itself epistemically astray
It didn't look well upon someone to be a 'couch potato' in the 1980's. Excessive television watchers were ostracized. We haven't hit that point yet with the Internet, but it feels like a future generation may yet plant a cultural flagpole to make it happen.
But I don't think it has ever been without the issues you describe.
The best solution has always been to combine several (or more) of the best overall sources - despite, and with familiarity of, their individual bents/limitations.
The "mainstream" media is still dramatically better than the "alternative" crowd. Whose followers are ironically uncritical, despite generally being more problematic.
A few cherry-picked examples seems like a really weird way to try and prove cherry-picking is happening, much less establish "cherry picking has become worse since a certain date"
There is an internal contradiction within our capitalist systems, some people live by selling their labors for wages, and some by leasing their capital for labor (to get more capital). Evidently those two interests are opposed, and ergo leads to issues when one side gains two much power over the other, because the power imbalance is very much not self-correcting.
Classes are used to refer to these groups of opposing intersts. There would be no need for classes if there was no conflict. Things only exist in their opposition to other things.