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Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

m.nautil.us

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Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#271

Post by kadenshep »

anigbrowl wrote: post #180
jayess wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baffling conceit here is that people in government are angels and people in business are evil. They’re still people, with all the same motivations.

No it isn't. It's the more prosaic observation that governments are more accountable by procedural mechanisms than privately owned firms. How well those mechanisms work is subject to wide variance; nobody believes that North Korea actually operates in a democratic fashion,. but there are many countries that self-evidently do. The concept of a constitutional republic (as opposed to all of its real world implementation…

The most level headed statement instead of immediately going with some Libertarian thought terminating cliche and it's being downvoted.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#272

Post by addicted »

standupstandup wrote: post #249
addicted wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demarcation line is pretty clear IMO (it isn’t even social media). It’s technology whose goal is to manipulate its users to engage with itself. And it hires an army of engineers, designers, scientists, and soon AI to achieve that goal. Right now it’s social media that is at the forefront of this war with people. Tomorrow it might be a different technology.

That's not clear at all. Do you think the Twitter founder's goal was literally written down somewhere as "manipulate users to engage with it"? Or for Facebook? None of these companies will agree with that assessment, so it's entirely your own subjective opinion.

Well, the interviewee in the article provides a good metric.

You don't need to look at the founders' intentions. You simply need to look at the metrics they are optimizing on. For public companies like Facebook and Twitter it's even easier. You have to look at the metrics they are talking to their investors about.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#273

Post by flanbiscuit »

It's not just the distraction from media, it's also the many ways that people can get in touch with each other. I recently wrote down all the many ways a person can reach me and it was ridiculous.

Mobile: Voice calls, SMS

Email: Personal x 2, Work, Work shared inbox, Some shared inboxes for side projects

Apps: Facebook Commenting, Messenger chat, Messenger Calling, WhatsApp multiple group chats, Whats app Calling, Slack (Active in about 5 different Slack channels), Discord (Active in 2 discord channels), Google Hangouts, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Google’s Duo app

Sites: Reddit, Hacker News

I could probably go on. I turn off all main notifications for all apps. The only notifications I leave on are @ mentions in a couple apps because I know they won't come often.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#274

Post by wallace_f »

anigbrowl wrote: post #198
wallace_f wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>so people can see where stories originate and learn to be skeptical of stuff that comes from consistently unreliable or bizarre sources. This is closer to the problem, not the solution. This caused the NASA Challenger disaster (authorities silenced engineers who warned of foam strike). This caused the US to lose the space race (all the authority and "intelligence community" was behind the Vanguard rocket). This caus…

I fail to see what my comment has to do with your laundry list of examples. I'm not arguing for centralized autocratic filtering but a mechanism for labeling points of origin and exposing that information to consumers. Your examples don't seem appropriate either. I suggested that people would choose to reject information from 'consistently unreliable or bizarre sources'. Your first counter-example is that of a NASA e…

>I fail to see what my comment has to do with your laundry list of examples. I'm not arguing for centralized autocratic filtering but a mechanism for labeling points of origin and exposing that information to consumers.

Ok so let's take a look and go down the list of examples. We can start with NASA, where the "point of origin," being mere engineers who could not match the gravitas and authority of the well-respected leadership, saw the idea rejected, not on merit, but on their point of origin being less-respected than their superiors.

This problem of rejecting ideas, not on their own merit, but on the authority or gravitas of establishment figures is the thread that ties all of those ideas together--and many other setbacks in history as well.

Discrediting ideas by their point of origin can do real damage not just to the democratization of information dissemination, but also to the ideas themselves even if they have merit, as well as to indepedent journalism.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#275

Post by Dylan16807 »

hindsightbias wrote: post #27
branchless wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In London there are adverts on the steps I walk up on the underground. The busker spots are "sponsored". It's like the Clockwork Orange "aversion therapy" in terms of making you watch. I'm very aware of what the media is doing but it has to get through on some level. Much of advertising is telling you that you are incomplete and product x will complete you / cement friendships etc. Of course that is crap, but even ju…

First company that integrates something like Google glasses and adblock gets my money.

The sentiment sounds like a good idea, but a nitpick. Google glass is not "mixed reality" or whatever the best term is. It's just a small display you can glance over to. It covers/integrates with nothing.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#276

Post by cokeandsympathy »

smsm42 wrote: post #99
wffurr wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"voluntarily surrendering your free will to distractions brought to you by profit-seeking entities" That's one way to describe an "industry [that] employs some of the smartest people, thousands of Ph.D. designers, statisticians, engineers [that] go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower." From the article. "People's Democratic Central Party Committee" Nice straw-man that conflate…

> go to work every day to get us to do this one thing, to undermine our willpower That's ominously sounding bullshit. You decide what to do with your willpower, and if you don't like the consequences, it's your fault, not some nefarious engineers. If you don't like facebook, don't go there. If you don't like particular site, don't go there, of if you absolutely can't control yourself, install one of a thousand progra…

What do you do then when millions of others fail to take that responsibility? Do we have a responsibility to build a system that encourages people to take responsibility for themselves and others or that eliminates means by which some are led to act irresponsibly?

Take drug addiction as an example. Sure, we can tell addicts 'well you shouldn't have done drugs' or 'just quit' to an addict. Do we then ignore those who have engineered a system to get people hooked? Many health experts point to the over-prescription of opiate painkillers led in part by a medical industry hoping to maximize profits. All the while their dependence creates negative externalities to others in society through crime and poor decision-making.

At the end of the day rationality is an abstraction of actual human behavior. We can make decisions that are 'rational' in a neo-liberal economic sense, but that we ultimately regret. When profit rules all else, businesses will exploit this discrepancy.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#277

Post by gkya »

agumonkey wrote: post #265
gkya wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solid advice. I'll add to this: - Do not follow newspapers RSS feeds. They bombard you with news that are not relevant at all. Their newsletters are better. I get all my news from daily or weekly newsletters. I would like to get weekly digests only, but I havent found a good one from a newspaper I like. - Actually quit Facebook. It's pure evil. I was so shocked to hear how it showed you your old, forgotten photos/mem…

it's funny, your comment makes me think.. the world has too many moving parts to follow them all, so a carefully curated summary of events would be interesting. annnnd that's the press (which got injured by the stream fad.. irony)

I dream about an AI service that can curate me a newsletter given some sources (RSS, Twitter feeds, youtube feeds, whatnot) and send it to me regularly on a given interval. It would avoid duplicates and essentially identical stuff [1], weigh and choose the most interesting ones, and present them to me in a nice, readable format. Ironically I would not use such service if it existed because it would be very anti-privacy.

[1] Twitter is weird. I only follow ~15 accounts for events and (want to) use twitter only for that, but the way people usually post updates about events is to repeatedly post what is essentially the same tweet, and even with that many accounts followed it becomes a mess. I end up never checking it because it's basically a puzzle.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#278

Post by keypress »

senko wrote: post #128
tribune wrote: post #34

I've been coming to resent my smartphone more and more, essentially because of this. I recently quit using tobacco. I remembered all the warnings from my school health classes about how hard it was to quit once you start, how there's a physical dependence and all that. It was uncomfortable at times, and there were plenty of cravings to get over, but I was ultimately successful. I can compare this to the couple of tim…

Here's how I (try to) keep the Internet-based distractions to a minimum: * Uninstall twitter, facebook and other social apps from your phone; only use the computer (or other device that's not constantly in your pocket). * Even on your computer, log out of twitter, facebook and others. Only log in when you want to look into something (eg. check the social events, send a message), and use private/incognito mode for thi…

When internet connections were pay per minute, I'd think about what I wanted to look up before I connected. Then I'd go online and used Opera to follow many links to different tabs. I'd have a flurry, then disconnect and read. This worked surprisingly well.

I find I can't really read/comprehend from an LED screen well at all these days. I got into the habit of sending items of interest to my e-reader. Any long form article goes there.

Sadly I sat on my e-reader, and my system went to pot. I've just stacked up my reading list. I have no idea what is there. Going back to scrappy reading, feels like a real time and brain drain.

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#279

Post by free_everybody »

johnvega wrote: post #250
tonystubblebine wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I commissioned a series of articles on the practical side of reconfiguring your phone and laptop for your own aims (based mostly on Tristan Harris' work). https://betterhumans.coach.me/three-articles-to-reclaim-your... And I'm 100% with you. It was a huge revelation for me personally when I realized new technology doesn't necessarily make me happier. Probably like a lot of us, I grew up obsessed with new tech, new co…

Time Well Spent, a movement to demand technology platforms serves our best interests, not advertisers. https://goo.gl/fsW8Qq

This was an amazing talk. Wow!

Re: Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

#280

Post by gkya »

unholiness wrote: post #86

I personally haven't found the same effect in long-form media, such as: - Non-fiction books - University-centered online courses - Documentaries - Some of Netflix's original programs - Wikipedia's monthly news summaries - The "Great Courses" on Audible These media aren't thoroughly monetized on a pay-per-attention-stolen model. They're more optimized around having good reviews from friends and online. It makes me won…

> Wikipedia's monthly news summaries

I'd be glad if you could provide me with the link to subscribe these summaries if they're email newsletters. I could not find them in the wiki itself.

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