Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 199 posts

Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

#81

Post by 2939223 »

docdeek wrote: post #67

There's a quote in a Michael Crichton novel (The Lost World) that seems relevant here. As part of a rant connecting the idea of the internet and evolution, a character opines: "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big contin…

Globalism is the great filter. Social media is the first taste.

COVID as an example, would have previously been a contained regional outbreak. Globalism made it an instant problem for every continent. Social media exacerbated responses in most every country.

Interconnectivity is fragility.

Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

#83

Post by cortesoft »

docdeek wrote: post #67

There's a quote in a Michael Crichton novel (The Lost World) that seems relevant here. As part of a rant connecting the idea of the internet and evolution, a character opines: "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big contin…

I get the sentiment, and there might be nuggets of truth to the idea, but there are some fundamental aspects of biological evolution that make it different.

Biology evolves through mutation propagation, and larger populations tend to regress mutations to the mean more than smaller populations.

Behavior changes don't require any mutations, and they can be shared in all directions (unlike mutations, which can only be shared with descendants) This already fundamentally changes how societies can evolve.

Second, if this were true, the number of innovations would have decreased after we became globally connected. This hasn't been the case, as we have continued to innovate and create new things even after we have been globally connected.

While our global society does propagate some homogeneity (McDonalds and Starbucks everywhere), it also lets innovations spread very quickly, which gives more chances for amazing new things to propagate.

Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

#84

Post by RGamma »

docdeek wrote: post #67

There's a quote in a Michael Crichton novel (The Lost World) that seems relevant here. As part of a rant connecting the idea of the internet and evolution, a character opines: "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big contin…

Diversity: bottom-up

Uniformity: top-down

Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

#85

Post by mrfusion »

grawprog wrote: post #16

I think social media needs to be redefined. What the average person thinks social media is is very different than what it actually is. I think a lot of people think big social media platforms are actually communication platforms, they're not. They're designed intentionally to be difficult to communicate on. That the not the purpose of them, it's in the name 'social media' they are the media, you are the social. They…

> true global communication platform would look nothing like the social media we have today.

Perhaps it would look like that brief golden age when everyone had a self hosted blog and we subscribed to each other with RSS readers.

Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

#86

Post by horsawlarway »

jack_pp wrote: post #76
docdeek wrote: post #67

There's a quote in a Michael Crichton novel (The Lost World) that seems relevant here. As part of a rant connecting the idea of the internet and evolution, a character opines: "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big contin…

That's a pessimistic way of putting it. "In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas"... but aren't those brought about by evolution as well? And as far as I can see the top ten keeps changing, evolving. My argument is that the internet has enabled hyper-evolution. You get access to the best possible information, you have through torrents and libgen access to all…

But isn't this exactly why you end up slowing down? You get groups trapped in local maxima of behavior.

An isolated group is forced to find novel solutions because they don't have a body of evidence to lean back on.

In comparison, if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that.

It might be sub-optimal, but the odds you develop something better are low. So it benefits you to use the established method.

But the group at large would benefit more from having lots of people try novel things, because otherwise innovation stagnates as the "known" solution takes precedence everywhere.

Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

#87

Post by mrfusion »

mrkramer wrote: post #22

Wasn't early Facebook all about connecting with friends and family and looking for boyfriend/girlfriend? Today I only hear something like "fake news, hate, racism, violence" etc. I wonder what has changed? I think that it is not Facebook's management fault but the reality kicked in. Medium like Facebook is convenient for all type of content and interaction unlike Instagram for example which is more for showing off wi…

They didn’t get enough engagement with positive social interactions so they had to harness the worst parts of our psyche.

Sounds eerily similar to this:

> Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering.

Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

#88

Post by sitkack »

"Stewardship of global collective behavior."

https://www.pnas.org/content/118/27/e2025764118

Abstract

> Collective behavior provides a framework for understanding how the actions and properties of groups emerge from the way individuals generate and share information. In humans, information flows were initially shaped by natural selection yet are increasingly structured by emerging communication technologies. Our larger, more complex social networks now transfer high-fidelity information over vast distances at low cost. The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.

Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

#89

Post by thethethethe »

anigbrowl wrote: post #72
thethethethe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said that they cant, it's more that people are writing articles about their opinions when they are bringing nothing new to the table. Why doesn't vox write articles about a grocery store clerk or trucker's opinion on social media and society? Why does some biologist somehow know more about this stuff than other people who aren't sociologists? This is why conservatives think academics are snooty and elitist

I am absolutely interested in the opinions of biologists and ecologists on this topic because they are in the business of studying complex systems, competing populations etc.

I'd be interested too if they wrote a paper about it instead of repeating mainstream talking points in a Vox article

Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity

#90

Post by lamontcg »

docdeek wrote: post #67

There's a quote in a Michael Crichton novel (The Lost World) that seems relevant here. As part of a rant connecting the idea of the internet and evolution, a character opines: "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big contin…

So you're saying a wide varity of echo chambers is a good thing to avoid intellectual monoculture?
Post reply on HN