[deleted]
Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
111–120 of 199 posts
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems many people have a completely unscientific view of reality in that they have absolute certainty in what they believe to be true. I think there are people who are looking for North Korea level approval ratings on things. If you have zero uncertainty in what you think is true then anything contradictory is naturally "misinformation".
If you wanna go around arguing the Earth is flat, you need to have something more persuasive than 'do the research.' Not that you personally believe in a flat earth, but it's a good example of why we shouldn't treat epistemological uncertainty as the starting point; there is so much evidence for Earth being round and so little offered in favor of it being flat that its roundness should be treated as a fact unless ext…
Do you believe this is an appropriate analogy, given our very limited understanding of the COVID situation?
If so, I would implore you to ponder the shape of the surface that we inhabit without the hindsight of 1000 years of R&D.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't consider HN to be social media. It's a forum isn't it? Mostly anonymous and no "pushing" of feeds or content.
From Wikipedia: > Social media are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks Sounds like social media to me
> Social media are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks
This description would include email and SMS - and no one describes those as social networks.
HN is a forum.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#114The problem is, that social media and the hate waves it generates, can be used to hack the elite - the decision makers. It convinces them, that more social media, more china style social media control is necessary. Fear is a strong vector. And if you can create the proof that you are needed, you control the market.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#115Long before social media, most movies, TV shows and the like in the US came out of California and New York. These are very urban places and I spent a lot of my life feeling kind of like "I must be doing it wrong" because my life didn't seem to match up with what I was seeing in popular media. I eventually concluded that for most of America, what we see on TV and in movies doesn't match our lives. I think the internet…
You are expected to believe that what a movie offers is an idealized, exaggerated or just plain fantastic take on real life. Examples exist that cannot tell reality from fiction, but that's generally the gist of it.
However, much more people are willing to believe that what they see in social media is real. Now think of how many people are feeling "they must be doing it wrong", with that in mind.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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.
There’s ways around this, though. For example, occasionally accepting a method that’s worse in the short term can eventually lead to a better long term solution. The likelihood of accepting a worse solution can be inversely proportional to how much worse it is to the current solution. The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm does exactly this to avoid local maxima.
Meaning you just need some people to take a seemingly worse idea and run with it occasionally. I think there will always be a few brave or naive souls willing to do that.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
From Wikipedia: > Social media are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks Sounds like social media to me
> Social media are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks This description would include email and SMS - and no one describes those as social networks. HN is a forum.
To start, social media != social network. I am saying that HN and other forums are a form of social media, albeit a very primitive form. Forums enable individuals to interact to create and exchange information, as opposed to mass media where things are centrally distributed and consumed with no input.
> This description would include email and SMS
I would absolutely consider SMS and email to be a social network, they are just limited and have fewer features.
Definition of social network from wikipedia:
> A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors
> no one describes those as social networks
I do acknowledge that there is a more nebulous popular definition of social media which refers to the major platforms. However, when you try to define what makes them different than email and SMS, things get challenging. If email, an network of independent actors exchanging information isn't a social network, then what set of features would make it a social network and why? All of the major platforms have different sets of features, some of them overlapping. What set of common features makes them a social network and why?
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#118There'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…
The Last Archive's It Came From Outer Space [S01E06] helped me better understand Crichton.
https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-2/episode-6-it-came-fr...
My own TLDR: Explains how the trauma and betrayal experienced by Boomers impacted that generation, and how it may have forged Crichton's personal philosophy.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#119There'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 s…
> unlike mutations, which can only be shared with descendants
Actually, transgenesis happens. E.g. bacteria can share genes horizontally with plasmids. And viruses may bring genes from unrelated species.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#120What a relief it was to read that these particular people were so concerned about misinformation prevailing, as most of what they consider misinformation is many of us call freedom, leadership, faith, and courage.
Social media is horrible for lots of reasons, mainly because it throws everyone who would never normally encounter each other into the same bucket of crabs, but their framing of the problem essentially reduces to being concerned the wrong kind of crabs are climbing too far.