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Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

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Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#11

Post by williamtrask »

MarkLowenstein wrote: post #5

Seems like a mode of thinking that is appearing everywhere, not just on social media. Go to MOD Pizza. You can order any toppings you want--your favorites. Yet many if not most people will go through the menu of preselected toppings combos to see if there's one they'd like. This makes no sense to me.

Freedom of choice isn't that freeing if you don't have time/money to actually permute through all the options to find what you like.

This is the actual reason why the door is continually held open for propaganda and centralized control. Decentralizing everything struggles with inefficiency problems.

The first person to really discover and popularize this was Edward Bernays — who invented Public Relations to help corporations and politicians weaponize this inefficiency. He kicked off the "Mad Men" of 20th century New York.

The introduction to Bernays's book "Propaganda" lays this out very clearly:

https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_en...

Or if you don't like reading... another overview of Bernays is Adam Curtis's "Century of the Self"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s

We will keep giving up control to centralized forces until we can share information freely and efficiently about what choices lead to better/worse outcomes in a decentralized way.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#12

Post by velancogito »

I would disable all short videos in the feed on every platform because they are completely useless but it is not possible in these apps.

I can't remove the apps because I might need them to check something important or write someone, so I forced to use my willpower to skip these videos everyday.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#13

Post by svara »

Social media has really proven that phrase that "the medium is the message", which I remember long ago thinking was a little odd and not obviously true.

With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this:

We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasoning.

So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#14

Post by cratermoon »

tempodox wrote: post #4

I can't help thinking that those receptive to the message would have drawn consequences long since. The feeds themselves would have chased them away. Can you wean a crack addict by telling them to stop using? Maybe, but I don't see a high probability of success. I sure hope I'm wrong.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#15

Post by gooosle »

ph4evers wrote: post #2

Yes totally! I like Reddit because you can pick your own subreddits but even that can be flooded by ragebait/clickbait

Most subreddits tend towards complete bubbles, where anything that goes against the prevailing opinions gets down voted into oblivion or outright deleted by mods.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#16

Post by majormajor »

MarkLowenstein wrote: post #5

Seems like a mode of thinking that is appearing everywhere, not just on social media. Go to MOD Pizza. You can order any toppings you want--your favorites. Yet many if not most people will go through the menu of preselected toppings combos to see if there's one they'd like. This makes no sense to me.

Choices take energy. If there are curated defaults it's often more pleasant to save that energy for something else. And most people don't have a sole "favorite" choice that they'd go to every time vs trying variety. Heck, you could even spend more energy on deciding whether or not to go somewhere else entirely.

Algorithmic content feeds are a much more important battle to fight, but "spend more effort on every single other decision too" is not gonna put people in a place to want to be more selective. It'll tire them out more and make them more likely to just put on the default idiot box feed.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#17

Post by cmrx64 »

MarkLowenstein wrote: post #5

Seems like a mode of thinking that is appearing everywhere, not just on social media. Go to MOD Pizza. You can order any toppings you want--your favorites. Yet many if not most people will go through the menu of preselected toppings combos to see if there's one they'd like. This makes no sense to me.

The combinatorial space is huge, and when I scan through the _curated_ list, I expect the establishment to provide some options from that space that are Actually Good. Maybe something I wouldn’t usually go for calls out to me. It’s an idea generator.

There’s this concept of “babble and prune” (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/babble-and-prune) and I argue that for food (and probably most opinions…) the prune aspect is where your personal taste gets most expressed. So they are doing you a service by pre-babbling a set of options for you prune.

Maybe this framework can shed some sense :)

In other words: I’m just trying to get a good pizza, man, I’m not some kind of pizza artist.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#18

Post by williamtrask »

svara wrote: post #13

Social media has really proven that phrase that "the medium is the message", which I remember long ago thinking was a little odd and not obviously true. With all the new stuff coming out in the LLM field, I've taken a cynically mechanistic view to this: We're basically being conditioned by (the currently popular crop of) social media to work in very short context windows, which aren't sufficient for advanced reasonin…

> So yes, totally. Turn it off and go read a book.

For what its worth, 500 years ago people were just as worried about books as we are today about newsfeeds. But it took a long time for books to ultimately decentralize enough to become a more egalitarian, community knowledge. But even that's not entirely the case now. Books can be propaganda just like everything else.

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#19

Post by lolinder »

The author sort of (but not really) acknowledges this midway through, but this is basically a summary of the most recent Technology Connections video, Algorithms are breaking how we think:

https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA

I'd rather they acknowledge Alec as the inspiration/source for this post at the beginning and explicitly, rather than just mentioning the video in passing midway through, but at least they do link to it!

Re: Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think

#20

Post by icepat »

ph4evers wrote: post #2

Yes totally! I like Reddit because you can pick your own subreddits but even that can be flooded by ragebait/clickbait

Reddit, in my opinion, is the absolute worst platform for this. It's incredibly easy to manipulate the appearance of consensus opinion. Also, the degree of power the individual moderators have on shaping conversations means instead of an algorithm choosing what you see, someone who spends up to 8 hours a day on Reddit chooses what you see. Lots of these moderators are not the sort of people who should have any place shaping conversations.
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