https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values
Nebulous platitudes that tell us nothing, stake out no hard positions, and leave things open to pull a complete 180 in the future.
Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
111–120 of 186 posts
Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
#112Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
#113Oh hi! That’s me! (And a bunch of other folks). Happy to answer any questions. I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It’s in our own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let’s talk.
I have a hypothesis. It goes like this. Today all the major text-based social platforms work in about the same way: we type text into an empty little box that's threaded under another box. There are variations in ranking and flagging, but the basic mechanism is unchanged. It is striking to me that, in all these years, we have explored only a tiny little corner of the design space. There are no mechanisms to lower the…
>Do you know of anyone working on healthy engagement?
Wikipedia is one, by not "working on" it.
>It's almost as though we sold millions of cars without brakes, everyone is crashing into things and hurting each other, and our response as a society is to throw up our hands and say "Welp, guess humans are just too stupid to drive cars safely."
No, they have brakes, it's just that half of the car owners are punching people who work at Jiffy Lube and screaming that brakers should be killed.
>But what if there were such a thing as "healthy engagement"?
"Engagement" can not ever be healthy because "working on" it relies on manipulation. Curiosity implies an absence of manipulation and a maximum of arbitrary connections.
You want healthy engagement? Create something well-loved that doesn't depend on or require any additional action from the appreciator for them to experience its complete impact.
Oh shit, that's hard! "Well then how about I scare them into clicking on a link that pays me money when they do so, then use an image and/or words to call them inadequate in some aspect of their lives so that they send me more money?" Tomato-tomahto?
Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
#114Oh hi! That’s me! (And a bunch of other folks). Happy to answer any questions. I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It’s in our own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let’s talk.
How do you ensure that "integrity" does not morph into "ban everything our groupthink says is wrong"? How do you ensure you're not coopted into an ideological or partisan propaganda/speech control efforts - a trap that so many "fact checkers" gladly fallen into?
One content agnostic approach to improving signal to noise is the tendency for deep chain sharing to be mostly false/misleading content. Introducing a forced copy-paste hurdle after the chain gets, say, 4 deep, would be content agnostic, but probably improve the quality of what get's spread.
Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
#115Trying to make something an 'institute' corrupts its integrity from the get-go.
Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
#116https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values Nebulous platitudes that tell us nothing, stake out no hard positions, and leave things open to pull a complete 180 in the future.
I don't know what tegridy is, but that is some good shit!
Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not so eager to jump to that kind of conclusion, because it's too facile. You might personally decide that anyone who worked for FB has no integrity, but I don't think it makes for a good discussion on HN.
What may be interesting to discuss is if one can regain the integrity that was perceived to be lost in the first place? I have done things I am not proud of. Sometimes it was due to ignorance, greed, selfishness or indifference. For those that condemn Facebook employees as being unethical, is there a path forward? Regarding Facebook, I would like all employees to quit. I will also hire former Facebook employees. I kn…
Even employee #1? Intern can be redeemed, but can a lifer? Can the person that invented the like button?
Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not working on integrity but really, really interested in seeing this coming alive. I've had a very deep curiosity about this topic for a couple of years, allegedly Facebook's products might have influenced the elections on my home country (Brazil), which has very directly impacted the quality of life of my family still living there. Looking forward to see what comes out of this and wishing you and the team all the b…
Thank you! I helped set up the Brazil Election War Room -- the first election war room inside of FB. It was intense! There is a special place in my heart for your country <3
More or less intense than the Myanmar Genocide War Room? Was it the first genocide war room at facebook or were there ones before it?
Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
#119That sounds a bit like "former Enron staffers launch Ethical Business Institute". I mean I'm sure some nice people worked for Enron too, but... Also I can't point at the exact place but it definitely has a whiff of "how we get DNC/government to control all major information platforms without them explicitly controlling all major information platforms". I mean, I have nothing against banning troll farms and such, but…
If a bunch of Enron staffers left Enron due to frustration with the company and built an Ethical Business Institute to improve industry practices, I would be interested to see what they had to say.
In any industry, it's a difficult balance between expertise and bias - but we have tackled these problems and understand the nuances in detail.
We also have folks from a mix of political backgrounds.
Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
#120Long before the Internet, you could go through an airport and be unable to avoid the Moonies & the followers of Lyndon LaRouche. You could find the book "None Dare Call It Treason" and lots of people did. "The Daily Worker" (newspaper of the US Communist Party) was readily available. Any of those groups could take out ads in the newspaper, or hold demonstrations (like the Nazi Party in Skokie, IL). There were UHF sta…
Democracy has absolutely collapsed. Our days are governed for eight hours by autocratic bosses and for eight hours by autocratic "products" and "services." We have no say about how our work is conducted, nor about what poisons hit the shelves.
It's astonishing to me that anyone thinks we have "democracy" under Capitalism, where plutocracy masquerades as meritocracy – which isn't democracy, anyway!
> They can decide for themselves what to believe.
In a vacuum, perhaps, but not under the inescapable deluge of marketing for not just commercial and classically "religious" institutions but the "patriotism" of American Civil Religion. Our consent to all the above — to the taxes we pay, and to the work that we do — is all manufactured by this propaganda. Our agency is tightly, tightly constrained by plutocratic machinations. (To say nothing of the constraints applied especially to marginalized identities, some of whom are living in a post-apocalyptic hell-scape and surviving literal genocide).
Democracy has long since collapsed. Count yourself lucky not to have noticed.