The internet is increasingly a low-trust society • Hacker News Board

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#151

Post by buboard » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:43 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #141

kerblang wrote: post #140

Maybe the problem is that ever since google the only metric anyone has bothered to devise is "popularity", which was never a particularly good indicator of truth to begin with.

Google was built heavily on authority, not just popularity. Otherwise you could easily buy your way above Wikipedia, a non-profit organization (Wikimedia) - which ranks at or near the top for every query. Quora, or some other VC backed knowledge service with a couple hundred million to vaporize, would overtake Wikipedia through the direct purchasing of popularity. Then others would quickly follow, entirely wiping Wik…

Yeah google isn't built on popularity, but everything else is. And it's partly our fault for using aggregators.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#152

Post by chongli » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #149

chongli wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Third, it's time platforms start paying specialists for crucial things like product reviews Given that platforms earn a commission on every sale, why should they be trusted to procure specialists' reviews? Maybe they would prefer to hire professional charlatans to boost the reviews on everything, in order to drown out the legitimate opinions of aggrieved customers?

Sure that's a great recipe to lose your customers. Shops have an interest in having honest reviews, and if they are gaming them, someone else will provide more honest ones.

Classically, you're right, but Amazon seems to operate by a different set of rules. Prices, availability, and recommendations change constantly according to some internal algorithm. In effect, no two users are shopping in the same store. This disrupts the ability for users to communicate about what's going on at Amazon. The whole thing is a big mystery and most people just see what they think is a good deal and snap it up before it's gone.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#153

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:46 PM UTC

schaefer wrote: post #104

abathur wrote: 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…

[deleted]

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#154

Post by buboard » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

okjustgo wrote: post #97

Maybe I missed something, but when was the internet ever high-trust? I feel like since it's inception savvy users always applied a healthy amount of skepticism and made thier own choice whether or not they believed something "on the internet". This included both facts on websites and conversing with other humans on chat.

> but when was the internet ever high-trust?

Exactly. It started when big corp tried to lure in more users by giving them free cheese, making them believe that the internet is a safe place to post your name, address, work life and sex habits. Everyone at the time thought it was crazy that people did that, and yeah they were right.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#155

Post by buboard » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:00 PM UTC

dschuetz wrote: post #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 wi…

Things were worse 20 years ago for the general internet , with few "trustable" brand names anyway. Piracy, viruses and scams were all over the place. If anything it's cleaner today, thanks to investments in security/antispam, but the mode of operation for scammers has changed.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#156

Post by jimktrains2 » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #77

This looks more like people new to the internet discovering what everyone else already knew: You can't trust strangers on the internet. You never could. If anything the internet nowadays is a more regulated, safer place than it used to be. The "wild west" internet of old now only endures in certain corners. It's no longer synonymous with the thing itself. Posting with your full name instead of anonymously or pseudony…

> This looks more like people new to the internet discovering what everyone else already knew: You can't trust strangers on the internet. You never could.

Like everything, this isn't absolutely true. People meet others they met through online means all the time, be it for clubs, dating, or commerce (e.g. craigslist). There is a certain societal expectation for how strangers are treated and that requires a bit of trust in someone you've never met.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#157

Post by buboard » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:03 PM UTC

0xfeba wrote: post #13

At probably a naive glance it seems related to anonymity. Would tying identity to online posts increase this trust? What if you had to insert your National ID Card to comment in some feedback forums? I remember YouTube tried this and failed due to pushback. What's the driver of this clickbait/instant gratification/hot take culture that's developing? Is it just ads?

I don't think so, because people should stop treating the internet as a private place. It really isnt, and the whole "we are real people with real names" is an illusion created by for-profit companies. I know that people desire safety by default, but they also have a very long history of trusting the wrong tyrants.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#158

Post by schaefer » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:13 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #116

schaefer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

The author is definitely a "spiritual person", he's a Buddhist monk and the french translator for the Dalai Lama. But he is also very scientifically minded. He has a PHD in cellular genetics from the institute pasteur[1].

One of the central themes of the book, and motivators for the author to write, is to address the contrast between other oriented (altruistic) and self oriented (selfish) societies. The author asserts that in the western fields of psychology, theories of evolution, and economics, it's often taken for granted that an individual's deeds, words, and thoughts are motivated by selfishness. To the extent that this assumption has nearly become dogma. The 868 page book, including a massive 160+ pages of notes, and bibliographies systematically lay out the scientific arguments against "the hypothesis of human selfishness".

You can read the sections of the book that specifically address "the selfish gene" with the following google search [2].

[1]: https://www.pasteur.fr/en/education/programs-and-courses/doc...

[2]: https://books.google.com/books?id=1k_2AwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#159

Post by DoreenMichele » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:23 PM UTC

chongli wrote: post #150

DoreenMichele wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a two-way street. Reality also follows from ideas. Perhaps most people can't tell good writing from bad, but the HN crowd is more able than average to distinguish the two. Yet the attitude here boils down to "writing isn't a real job -- if you don't like working for peanuts, then STFU and get a real job !" HN members actively find ways around pay walls, more aggressively than most use ad blockers etc. Most peo…

It isn't just a dichotomy that bad writers produce bad writing and good writers produce good writing. Good writers are even better at producing bad writing, because they produce bad writing that masquerades as good. We're not dealing with random defects, we're dealing with agents and their agendas.

We're not dealing with random defects, we're dealing with agents and their agendas.

That's a reasonable point, but people mostly don't tell me "It's a trust issue. I would pay if I believed I could trust the motives of the author/source."

The overall attitude expressed is consistently "I'm simply not going to pay for writing. If writers want a middle class income, they should get a real job."

Once in a great while someone will agree with the general point that if you want to be able to trust what an author is saying, you need to pay them for their writing and not expect them to monetize with ads or sponsors because that introduces a conflict of interest. One person cited Consumer Reports as an example of this model and why they pay for a subscription.

But that's the exception, not the rule. Most comments here consistently express the attitude that they simply will not pay for writing and writing is not a real job.

At the same time, journalists get attacked for not doing their job adequately well, etc. It mostly falls on deaf ears to point out that journalism simply doesn't pay what it used to and there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the lack of adequate pay and the lack of quality writing.

Re: The internet is increasingly a low-trust society

#160

Post by crazygringo » Tue, Jun 25, 2019, 3:26 PM UTC

schaefer wrote: post #158

crazygringo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

The author is definitely a "spiritual person", he's a Buddhist monk and the french translator for the Dalai Lama. But he is also very scientifically minded. He has a PHD in cellular genetics from the institute pasteur[1]. One of the central themes of the book, and motivators for the author to write, is to address the contrast between other oriented (altruistic) and self oriented (selfish) societies. The author assert…

From the links, it seems like his main criticism of Dawkins is actually merely the word "selfish" in the title of his book, and that the CEO of Enron liked it?

Yes, Dawkins is saying that "universal love" does not have an evolutionary component, which seems like a fairly uncontroversial claim.

It seems like your criticism of Dawkins is more a criticism of how other people have misunderstood him, rather than any criticism of the arguments in The Selfish Gene itself?

If you haven't, I highly suggest you read Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind". While it's at a popular level, it does a fairly good job at presenting a plausible framework for how moral behavior (like altruism) can emerge from evolutionary principles. [1] Haidt is probably one of the most influential moral psychologists today.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...