Allow me to direct your attention to the works of Tristan Harris, B. J. Fogg, and Herbert A. Simon. Simon coined the term "attention economy" in 1992 with
"The Bottleneck of Attention: Connecting Thought with Motivation".
Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
131–140 of 199 posts
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#132I 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…
Social media is as successful as it is precisely because it works so well as a communications paradigm. No popular social media platform is difficult to communicate on, they draw in so many users because they're easy to use. My mother who can barely use Windows knows how to chat with me on Facebook. People use social media to communicate between friends, family, coworkers etc all the time. That's how all of that mone…
> they draw in so many users because they're easy to use
They're easy to use because the major social media platforms know that reducing friction to use draws people in and keeps them there, while the platform serves their attention up to advertisers. There's even ways that they make it harder to stop using them than to just keep scrolling/refreshing. Dark Patterns abound.
People on social media are generally not communicating with each other, at least not in a meaningful sense. Social media users are sharing things that other people have created to draw attention, and whatever gets the most attention and shares, aka "engagement" sells the most ads, and makes the most money.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Good news! Bergstrom wrote a paper, titled "Stewardship of global collective behavior"[1], see also https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1408262388533456904
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#134This might be an unpopular opinion but I am getting very tired of academics thinking they can comment cross discipline and journalists somehow think it is worthy of writing an article about. This scientist isn't bringing any interesting, new ideas to the table, they are just repeating the same talking points pushed by mainstream "liberal" politicians. > My sense is that social media in particular — as well as a broad…
> Much of the "truth" mainstream liberals have been pushing in the past year has turned out to be false
For example?
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you name some problem that you feel has stagnated in the modern world? Sure - passive cooling for homes. Architecture used to vary dramatically by climate. In the last 50 years or so new homes are generally only designed for electric cooling.
Neat, there's your business idea :)
Hah, it doesn't sell, because we're at a local maxima with electric AC right now.
It's so easy to literally build a square box and stick a cooler/heater in it that everyone (including me) chooses to do it.
Does that mean it's the right way for us to be handling heating/cooling for our homes? Sure seemed like it 50 years ago. Sure seems less like it today with climate change, but we've already picked, and now general cultural preferences make it hard to undo (not even mentioning sunk costs on buildings that are hard to modify)
Basically - the point they're making is that as we homogenize, we put all the eggs in one basket. And we have a long history of making decisions that seem GREAT! today, but actually have some downsides at scale (like electric AC contributing to climate change, requiring more electric AC, making climate change worse, etc)
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#136This might be an unpopular opinion but I am getting very tired of academics thinking they can comment cross discipline and journalists somehow think it is worthy of writing an article about. This scientist isn't bringing any interesting, new ideas to the table, they are just repeating the same talking points pushed by mainstream "liberal" politicians. > My sense is that social media in particular — as well as a broad…
I like the irony of a story about the danger of social media here on HN. You know. Social media.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#137There'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…
Culture isn't reproduction, culture is horizontal gene transfer.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#138I think the global reduction in in person communication is a grave risk to humanity. We used to spend so much time together, doing things together, I’m talking in the office to the roller rink. Perhaps this just shows how old I am, but I really felt like that was better for humanity. Global communication and interaction is great and all, but I really miss sitting around the backyard with friends talking
Text based communication is the cause. Not social media. Anytime I go to a bar, people are paying attention their friends if something is going on, watching a band, or on their phone. Stranger interaction declines heavily the more people that are there. I've noticed this since the advent of texting. Not since the advent of social media. It's absurd to me honestly that someone would prioritize someone on their phone o…
We are, to put it simply, too entertained with our technologies to expend the initial effort to "touch some grass", meet people in real life. But we still need connection with people, so we invented technological tools that allow us to quickly and easily get in touch with others. Although the quality and satisfaction we get from this form of communication are much lower, it requires much less initial effort and hassle, so we accept it.
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
under the threshold of people that would be required to establish a self-sustaining colony Such a small group of people, armed with current genetic engineering and future artificial means of reproduction, could bring with them enough genetic diversity and reproductive capacity to reach colonizing scale. You can hop one time or one billion times, you won't clear the building because after each failed hop you're back t…
I think genetics is actually the easy part. A few dozen or so people, selected for strong health, probably contain enough genetic material in their groins to start a colony. More would doubtlessly be better, but I think such things have been done by humans on earth before. Frozen eggs/sperm and women willing to be surrogate mothers help a lot too; you wouldn't need artificial womb technology, necessarily. The hard pa…
I want to see it, but does a Mars colony have any chance before we’ve tested solutions for the major issues that Biosphere 2 quickly ran into?
Re: Some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity
#140"Focus on the downsides of democratized information; here are some cherry-picked experts." - Vox the entertainment website