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The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

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111–120 of 178 posts

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#111
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right -- it's ultimately a trust problem, and we're in an unfortunate negative feedback loop here. Bots aside, what we post on the internet (and believe in general) is a function of the information we consume. That information is increasingly consumed through the internet, and the internet (as typically used) is feeding us increasingly poor quality information. (To be consumed, then shared. Recurse...) We can (and I…

I find it interesting that when something uses proper grammar and spelling, it may appear more trustworthy. Consider this: a consumer that employs above average grammar and spelling skills to write product reviews may also be more skillful in forming and expressing valuable opinions and assessments of any product. I think that people are naturally inclined to pick up on those signals, whether the correlation is real…

Not only that: the exact same written text will appear more trustworthy depending on the typeface [1] (eg Baskerville > Helvetica > Comic Sans)

[1] https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/hear-all-ye...

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#112
post #55

If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale w…

It's true that "The Selfish Gene" has been a science-based classic of evolutionary biology for over 40 years. But it's also true that in those 40 years a lot of studies have taken aim at the central arguments of the book and in my opinion cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the books conclusions (Or perhaps limit the scope of those views as being a projection of western culture - but not of all cultures on earth, p…

Any chance you can post some of these counterpoints?

At first glance I’m not sure how a book on altruism/compassion refutes the gene-centred view of evolution, which holds that evolution is best viewed as acting on genes and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection based on genes.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This goes beyond trust, I think. The social structures of Internet communities are very different from those those in real life, and I'm highly disturbed when people try to transplant IRL social norms to the Internet thoughtlessly. This is where we get bone-headed ideas like the real-names policy for "the Internet". Now, I am not discounting that there is actually toxic, horrific harassment that goes on the Internet.…

A serious problem with the "let the people live in their own worlds" attitude is that many communities do not stay in their realms. You allude to this a little but, in my opinion, it's not a minor problem to be glossed over, it's the core of the trust issue: any online community that doesn't keep itself small and insular (and enforce this with sufficient opsec) is at risk of being invaded and exploited (for lulz, for…

I absolutely agree. Invasions are bad, crossing "community" boundaries is. I think that's also part of the "Internet Etiquette" to be learnt: what happens in one domain of the Internet should stay in that domain of the Internet. You don't bring your mischievous trolling behavior from Discord to Facebook, but you also don't bring your "comfortable-space" standards from a support group forum to a video game forum.

I acknowledge your argument that "diverse worlds" system may not be sustainable over time because it is unstable, particularly to new entrants who do have to learn the local lingo. I personally disagree, and would argue instead that that's something Internet users should learn to deal with. We've long had the solution for this: good moderation. You can have hyper-extensive moderation like r/askhistorians or Facebook support groups, you can have moderate moderation for spam and the like for things like generic hobby groups, and then you can have light moderation for spaces deliberately made for that. From heavy to light moderation, the burden shifts from the moderator to the user. Different Internet spaces should have different arrangements like this. While this solution may not be perfect, I argue that this is what works. I put this in contrast to another prevailing idea that all spaces should be like IRL (because that has maximal accountability and requires no context switching), and I argue that that's what will diminish the diversity and dynamism of the Internet.

I would further add a key ingredient to making this world is the tools provided by the platform to perform this moderation. That's one reason why Twitter, for all the good content it has, is also a mess, because there's no limit of cross-pollination of communities. Contrast this to, say, Reddit, which gives subreddit moderators significant powers to curate and protect their communities.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#114
That is not really surprising, is it? 20 years ago the Internet was populated with different people, because the subscriptions were expensive. And besides that, there was no mobile Internet, the user demographic was completely different. Now that literally everybody on this planet has access to the Internet, and, well, there are some rather unpleasant people out there, I think we've reached a new historical period with these "low-trust societies".

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#116
post #55

If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale w…

It's true that "The Selfish Gene" has been a science-based classic of evolutionary biology for over 40 years. But it's also true that in those 40 years a lot of studies have taken aim at the central arguments of the book and in my opinion cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the books conclusions (Or perhaps limit the scope of those views as being a projection of western culture - but not of all cultures on earth, p…

The book you're recommending seems to be about psychological and spiritual relationships between human beings, from what I can gather from a quick skim on Amazon. But not a single one of the reviews actually describes a single argument the book is making (strange), so it's hard to judge.

Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" is a scientific work about evolutionary selection at the gene level -- I don't recall him touching on psychology at all. (He provides evolutionary explanations for certain altruistic behaviors, but I don't recall him even starting on how they might be expressed via a psychological mechanism or at any conscious level.)

I can't quite imagine what either have to do with each other -- they seem to be such different topics. Or what Dawkins' work has to do with "western culture", or culture at all. At heart it's a quite mathematical/statistical argument.

I'm curious, what exactly do you see being refuted?

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#117
post #55

If I'm not mis-remembering, there's an interesting section in Dawkins' The Selfish Gene about cooperative grooming behavior (I think it was in some sort of water fowl) and how the birds deal with cheating behavior (individuals that accept grooming without reciprocating). My takeaway was roughly: Any exchange of value based on trust is exploitable. The simplest cure is excluding the exploiter, but this doesn't scale w…

It's true that "The Selfish Gene" has been a science-based classic of evolutionary biology for over 40 years. But it's also true that in those 40 years a lot of studies have taken aim at the central arguments of the book and in my opinion cast serious doubt on the accuracy of the books conclusions (Or perhaps limit the scope of those views as being a projection of western culture - but not of all cultures on earth, p…

>Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World

Aware that I might be jumping to conclusions but that doesn't sound like the title of an objective, scientific text.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#118
post #79

Can we trust the article that it is the internet that is becoming low trust, or is it reflecting society's trends? Trust has been fading in societies for decades [1] and apparently millenials are the most cynical [2] https://ourworldindata.org/exports/trust-attitudes-in-the-us... https://img.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/files/2014/... First, the internet has opened up, and its prominent platforms (which were…

Where is the footnotes?

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#119
post #101
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we shouldn't ignore it. But I think there's a risk of sending a lot of bright, productive people off to tilt at technological/interface/regulatory windmills in a way that leaves fundamental trust issues out of scope. Even if Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc. could wave a magic wand and remove every fake review, counterfeit product, scam, personal threat, or piece of false/fraudulent media, there would still be a tr…

One of the things the internet has been really great at is allowing those small (n~50) networks with high trust for e.g. identifying trusted vendors, but for really niche things where it’s hard to get an organic local network. Think new programming languages, or to crib from a recent HN topic, building tube headphone amps. These kind of emergent niche communities can only exist when the broader network gets sufficien…

I'm not sure I see hard top-down scale limits as a goal. I don't think this would be in the best interest of most people with a hand on the steering wheel of large social networks.

I'm imagining something more along the lines of: can we learn how to turn what small/niche networks do well into building blocks, and does that knowledge teach us anything we could use to (I guess adversarially) re-structure/reform some environments that are currently trust bonfires.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#120
post #94

In my mind, focusing on bots is kind of barking up the wrong tree. A lot of fake reviews on Amazon are written by real humans -- my main concern is not figuring out whether a human or a bot wrote a comment, it's figuring out whether or not the comment/review is trustworthy. If we got rid of all of the bots, that wouldn't make Amazon easier for me to use. I feel like scammers have already figured out that humans thems…

Amazon is weird, I bought a product in the mail the other day and they offered me a $20 coupon (the product only cost $25) if I wrote a five star review. So I wrote a one star review talking about how I don’t want to be bribed and they can’t make me be dishonest and to warn people. But amazon didn’t allow my review. So that sucks, and makes me not trust any reviews on Amazon.

Guessing that Amazon has some way for the seller to dispute the review, or they use some heuristics to determine that a comment is “on topic”.
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