But people know how to form their own opinion - YouTube likes to show me talks by Noam Chomsky, but I don't have to agree with him. I think they are blaming too much on these evil algorithms.
YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
121–130 of 272 posts
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#122I got frustrated with the Youtube recommendation system, and built a search engine of videos I scraped: https://www.findlectures.com
I'm relying primarily on trusted recommendations - if someone I trust likes a speaker, I'll index channels where they speak. This doesn't scale well, but it has made for a tool that works really well for doing research.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
To have an algorithm that favors extreme content above non-extreme content because it keeps people hooked is indeed unlikely to be programmed directly. I actually don't think it's learning personal preferences like you suggest either. It likely is a collaborative filtering method. You get served what people "similar to you" have watched most. Similarity is based on your watching behavior. If you watched 1,2,5,6,7 and…
As an interpretation of people who worked on the algorithms: > The YouTube algorithm I worked on heavily promoted Brexit, because divisiveness is efficient for watch time, and watch time leads to ads. https://www.twitter.com/gchaslot/status/1036323806242066432 Not clear what exactly technically he is referring to, whether your explanation fits. I suppose an algorithm that tended to cluster people together could be de…
You know, when I read the tweet and the discussion I think, people worry about AI becoming paperclip maximizer, but this is worse.
Our own society is becoming paperclip maximizer! We want to spend more time watching interesting videos and more dopamine shots.. And the company and people working for it, even indirectly, oblige.
We worry that there will be an AI where all of what it does is a consequence of giant misunderstanding of human nature. But what if there is nothing to misunderstand about humans, but it's rather our own design flaws that cause our desires, when being taken as an objective function to be ruthlessly maximized, lead to society that is, at best, extremely dull.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#124This seems like it could be inherent to recommendation systems. How would one go about making a recommendation system that doesn't have this effect?
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#125[deleted]
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#126This was addressed more broadly in "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads" by Zeynep Tufekci on TED. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 She remarked that Youtube's recommendation system invariably pushes people towards more extreme views on anything , not just politics. Interested in vegetarianism? Here's something about veganism. She has a hypothesis it works this way because the goal…
As has been pointed out, in lots of areas a "balanced" view doesn't make sense. I'm reminded of the judgement of Solomon dictating that, to settle a dispute between two women as to whom a baby belonged to, it should be cut in half and they be given half each. For a lot of social issues, being given the midpoint solution is like being given half a baby. "All humans are created equal and endowed with rights" is a radic…
So radical positions are okay as long as you're right?
Who gets to say who is right?
For every position that we think is good radical now, there are many more that were not. A slow moving, boring society is one I'd like to live in.
Exciting times make for short lives.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#127But people know how to form their own opinion - YouTube likes to show me talks by Noam Chomsky, but I don't have to agree with him. I think they are blaming too much on these evil algorithms.
Yes. 'Extreme' refers really to the emotional temperature rather than the content. 'Moderate' views, compromises, etc, don't make much sense and are therefore ultimately boring. This doesn't imply moderation or the battle for centre ground in politics is bad. After all we know more than we can tell, so we can't always explain our decisions and policies. It's merely that there's less to understand and/or criticise.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#128This was addressed more broadly in "We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads" by Zeynep Tufekci on TED. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891014 She remarked that Youtube's recommendation system invariably pushes people towards more extreme views on anything , not just politics. Interested in vegetarianism? Here's something about veganism. She has a hypothesis it works this way because the goal…
It may not be a universal result. It's an ml algorithm optimizing for engagement. If ten users watches mild entertainment for 30 minutes and one user watches conspiracy theories for five hours straight, the algorithm hones in on that case. I don't know if this is generally true or not, but I do know the algorithm regularly comes up with stuff I'm not interested in so I get bored and do something else.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> She has a hypothesis it works this way because the goal is to make people spend as much time on a site as possible, and feeding people progressively more extreme content works for that. While I understand the attractiveness of conspiratorial hypotheses, I think there is a simple explanation that applies to recommendation systems generally: such systems are designed, overtly, to identify content the user is likely t…
I don't really see why this is a conspiratorial hypotheses. The goal of youtube is to keep you on youtube watching videos with ads. That is what they are trying to do, and it happens to coincide with pushing extreme content as an unintended side effect.
Exactly. No one here, least of all Tufekci, is claiming that YouTube has deliberately engineered their recommendation system to favor extreme content. The argument is that it's an unintended consequence of how the YouTube recommender's objective function interacts with human psychology: (1) YouTube trains its recommenders to maximize time on site. (2) It's a sad fact about humans that sensationalistic or extreme content is highly engaging. (3) YouTube's recommendation system thus learns to serve up sensationalistic and extreme content.
Re: YouTube's tendency to push everyday users toward politically extreme content
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
As has been pointed out, in lots of areas a "balanced" view doesn't make sense. I'm reminded of the judgement of Solomon dictating that, to settle a dispute between two women as to whom a baby belonged to, it should be cut in half and they be given half each. For a lot of social issues, being given the midpoint solution is like being given half a baby. "All humans are created equal and endowed with rights" is a radic…
So radical positions are okay as long as you're right? Who gets to say who is right? For every position that we think is good radical now, there are many more that were not. A slow moving, boring society is one I'd like to live in. Exciting times make for short lives.
Would you be willing to expand on which radical progressive positions ended up being bad? I'd especially be interested to hear examples from the US.