> Things are increasingly getting worse
General purpose headline for attracting views, tying into the seductiveness of a general perception of doom and gloom.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2017/11/30/why-the...
The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
91–100 of 178 posts
Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
People forget that institutions take time to develop. They also forget that high-trust institutions frequently begin with a dictator. The end-point is high-trust/low-coercion, but you can't get there from low-trust/low-coercion. First you have to go through a high-trust/high-coercion state, after which you can gradually taper off the coercive elements as institutions mature and the individual actors get used to the n…
Careful. Soon you'll be arguing for the dictatorship of the proletariat. "Dictatorship does not necessarily mean the abolition of democracy for the class that exercises the dictatorship over other classes; but it does mean the abolition of democracy (or very material restriction, which is also a form of abolition) for the class over which, or against which, the dictatorship is exercised." -- Lenin. I'm not being comp…
Reminds me of The Republic, where Plato describes an ideal government of selfless, enlightened rulers that would over time devolve down into democracy, which then would end up in tyranny, because the people would choose a tyrant to get rid of the chaos.
Unrelated, I was unaware of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but that explains to me why communism ends up as a system of control: because it started out as a system of control in the first place. And why it's liberal (at least in the 1910s) intellectuals that were attracted to it: they were the ones ruling society in that system, which, as every intellectual knows, is The Way It Ought To Be. Of course, it got co-opted by the political sorts because control in the real world requires weapons not ideas.
Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
#93This looks more like people new to the internet discovering what everyone else already knew: You can't trust strangers on the internet. You never could. If anything the internet nowadays is a more regulated, safer place than it used to be. The "wild west" internet of old now only endures in certain corners. It's no longer synonymous with the thing itself. Posting with your full name instead of anonymously or pseudony…
This goes beyond trust, I think. The social structures of Internet communities are very different from those those in real life, and I'm highly disturbed when people try to transplant IRL social norms to the Internet thoughtlessly. This is where we get bone-headed ideas like the real-names policy for "the Internet".
Now, I am not discounting that there is actually toxic, horrific harassment that goes on the Internet. Doxxing and things like it are terrible and should never happen.
Rather, I'm arguing that people need to acquire a sort of "street smarts" when navigating the Internet. Much like when you travel to a foreign country, you may expect a different culture with different norms, so it is the same with the Internet. What's rude in one culture is simply social convention in another. What is casual conversation in one is taboo in another. I spent a lot of time on the Internet growing up and I feel like I have been inoculated against the worst parts of the Internet, but at times it feels like many people haven't.
A good example of this is how a lot of people and media take 4chan posts at face value, without realizing that a lot of it is completely self-aware and that the worst posts are almost always a game of who can post the most needlessly offensive thing possible. A lot of 4chan is an exercise is communication with no names and no filter. And yet some of my most informative conversations have been on 4chan precisely because there is no politeness filter, and posters can be as devastating critical as they want. But a reader also needs to learn how to tune in and out, correspondingly discount and read between the lines to get the most out of 4chan conversation, otherwise you simply come away with the idea that the community hates everything and everyone.
For a more tame example, I follow a couple of Twitch streamers. For example, for streamer A, most communication with their chat is saccharine and supportive. But for streamer B, the chat makes fun off and insults him the whole way especially he makes a mistake, and the streamer, and the streamer gives as good as he gets and makes fun of the chat the whole time too. And this is normal and fun engagement for all parties. From afar, streamer B's community looks extremely toxic, but that's the furthest thing from the truth. (What is abhorrent is when you take streamer B's chat behavior into streamer A's chat, and that is frowned upon by all parties.)
I believe that Internet activity should be diverse. There should be places where communication is an extension of real life (Facebook, emails), places of semi-anonymous and professional communication (Hacker News, certain subreddits/slack communitiees/GitHub), and then places where you should be able to go hogwild with whatever you want to say (fun subreddits, discord).
Twitter is unfortunately one of those places that has had all of these mixed together, which is why I decided to have multiple Twitter accounts targeting professional/personal hobby communication. From what I hear, kids are already tuning to this idea, with things like public/private instagram accounts.
The Internet is not all the same, and that's great. The Internet is not just real life, and that's great.
Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
#94In my mind, focusing on bots is kind of barking up the wrong tree. A lot of fake reviews on Amazon are written by real humans -- my main concern is not figuring out whether a human or a bot wrote a comment, it's figuring out whether or not the comment/review is trustworthy. If we got rid of all of the bots, that wouldn't make Amazon easier for me to use. I feel like scammers have already figured out that humans thems…
Amazon is weird, I bought a product in the mail the other day and they offered me a $20 coupon (the product only cost $25) if I wrote a five star review. So I wrote a one star review talking about how I don’t want to be bribed and they can’t make me be dishonest and to warn people. But amazon didn’t allow my review. So that sucks, and makes me not trust any reviews on Amazon.
Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
#95It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society. Back in the day, when you placed a long distance call, an operator would come on to ask you what your number was so the call could be billed to you. A single call might be a dollar or a few dollars, which would be ten to several tens of dollars in today's money. No one would imagine that such a system would work today.
It is simply one facet of more pervasive deceit in society. And that's probably rooted in people being fundamentally devalued and taken advantage of. We are seeing worse income inequality than in The Gilded Age and people act like it's a natural and unavoidable side effect of the existence of tech, the internet, whatever. That's BS. People created these things. If these things exploit people, it's because people desi…
I'd almost rather society just admit it's classist so it can be handled appropriately. Instead we're just in denial and no policies (for better or worse) will ever go towards what we need. I might sound conservative but I'm definitely democrat/liberal in most of my values. I just don't want to live near someone that is thuggish and may steal from my house.
Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
#96If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale w…
> Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable
I was thinking "money screws things up" and its corollary "free screws things up", then read your comment. It gets to the root of things.
With trust, trade is unlimited, so I wonder how to architect things to stand up to the problems we have.
Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
#97Maybe I missed something, but when was the internet ever high-trust?
I feel like since it's inception savvy users always applied a healthy amount of skepticism and made thier own choice whether or not they believed something "on the internet". This included both facts on websites and conversing with other humans on chat.
Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
#98If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale w…
My favorite concept from the book as well!
The name of the behavior you're looking for is Evolutionarily Stable Strategy [1] often abbreviated to just ESS.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strate...
Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What that article tells me is that people say they belong to teams they don't actually belong to I'm not sure that's consistent with the evidence. People are actively getting worse and worse at modeling the other "team", which strongly suggests that polarization is quite real indeed and not just a matter of different labels.
Democrats with higher education are getting worse and worse at modeling Republicans . I think that means that, in higher education, Republicans get exposed to real Democrats, and Democrats get exposed to a caricature of Republicans.
If true, that seems odd. There was an awful lot of very public searching for "what are Republicans, and how can we understand and empathize with them more?" after the last election. Tons. It's ongoing, in fact. It's mostly been—to an almost absurd degree—very gentle and good-hearted. If there's ever been anything like this sort of massive effort by Republican media figures and public intellectuals, I'd love to know about it, because their findings would surely be fascinating. I doubt there has been, at least in the last 30 years or so.
Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, we shouldn't ignore it. But I think there's a risk of sending a lot of bright, productive people off to tilt at technological/interface/regulatory windmills in a way that leaves fundamental trust issues out of scope. Even if Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could wave a magic wand and remove every fake review, counterfeit product, scam, personal threat, or piece of false/fraudulent media, there would still be a tr…
These networks would be scalable by using derived trust values. In simple terms you trust others to provide you with the trust value of people you have never met. I'm sure one could mathematically prove certain implementations to be unexploitable.
>>In simple terms you trust others to provide you with the trust value of people you have never met.
References? Credit Score?