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Scapegoating the Algorithm

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Re: Scapegoating the Algorithm

#21

Post by gausswho »

jsrozner wrote: post #5

Ugh, this fellow misses the forest for the trees. Though he's partially right: social media is partially an extension of past trends. See, e.g., "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Postman. But the real issues are not the ones to which he points. Our problem is that as a society we have no real values. Most people will take whatever job pays the most money irrespective of social consequences. Politicians will engage in a…

I re-read Amusing Ourselves to Death last year and I found it surprisingly apt for what the Internet represented in 2024. Most cultures haven't come to grips with what it's become. Apart from some hangers-on from the old days, all the attention gazes on all the junkiest places.

It didn't look well upon someone to be a 'couch potato' in the 1980's. Excessive television watchers were ostracized. We haven't hit that point yet with the Internet, but it feels like a future generation may yet plant a cultural flagpole to make it happen.

Re: Scapegoating the Algorithm

#22

Post by carlosjobim »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #11

America has been in a class war since the beginning. It just refuses to call it that. Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it. Phase One: 1770s The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, b…

> solve the class problem

But is it solvable? What if the desire to have somebody else to blame is stronger than any desire for freedom and equality? You want freedom, I want freedom, but does the average man want freedom if it is truly offered him?

Re: Scapegoating the Algorithm

#23

Post by carlosjobim »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #18
ants_everywhere wrote: post #10

I see a lot of intelligent people underestimating the impact of things like propaganda and advertising. The author is wrong about psychology: people are generally not savvy information consumers. They mostly converge on the average of what they see around them. Cult leaders use this to their advantage by removing people from family and non-biased sources of information. The human brain acclimates and it's hard to bre…

People who doubt the impact of propaganda need to explain how Google and Facebook bring in a hundred billion in revenue cash each quarter.

I'll make an attempt to explain it:

Advertising on TV cost tens of thousands of dollars and requires great effort, magazines and billboards a bit less on both fronts. But advertising on social media costs as little as you want, and these platforms are constantly asking business owners to throw in $20 or $50 to advertise. And when the business owner does so, Meta will give them completely fake statistics of how 40 000 people saw their ad. What does it matter that nobody clicked the ad and nobody purchased the product? Meta says right here that the ad was very effective. People love to gamble, and Facebook ads are nothing but a form of gambling for (usually small) business owners. "Sales have been slow this month, what if..." And since the barrier to spending on ads is so low, millions of people will take the bait. Add in the factor that advertisers can choose from hundreds of parameters to target the ads, and they feel like it's a skill they can train to win - hey it's just like sports betting!

Or somebody with a business or an executive has hired their niece to take care of "social media presence" for the company. Of course she is going to say that the ads she is buying on Meta are working great. Her job depends on it! Dito for outsourcing this to a third party that takes care of social media advertising. Of course they're going to give you phony presentations on how well their ads are working.

So it's not that the ads are working. It's a simple casino, and ad purchasers are the suckers.

Except for the 50%+ ads on Instagram which are outright scams and frauds. They probably bring in a lot of money to the advertisers.

Re: Scapegoating the Algorithm

#24

Post by bee_rider »

bongodongobob wrote: post #14
bee_rider wrote: post #6

I dunno. Things seem a lot dumber since social media, but I guess it is possible that the same dumbness is just being broadcast wider now that there aren’t any gatekeepers, I guess.

It's a feedback loop that legitimizes dumbness. 40 years ago, the area 51 guy got laughed at in the bar and he stopped talking about it. Now they can all find each other and jerk each other off.

I didn’t dig through their sources, but the article seemed to indicate that the amount of conspiratorial thinking hasn’t increases. So, they are jerking each other off, but not being legitimized, maybe?

Re: Scapegoating the Algorithm

#26

Post by wilg »

thrance wrote: post #20
msgodel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All societies have elites, you can't eliminate that. What you want are societies where the elite's interests and the people's interests are aligned. EDIT: meh. At least aristocracies typically had a connection with the people and tended to not openly attack them or their culture.

Classes are defined by their differing and opposing interests. By definition then, there can be no alignment between them. Capital owners want more labor for less capital, workers want more capital for less labor.

Doesn't sound like a very useful definition!

Re: Scapegoating the Algorithm

#27

Post by zugi »

zahlman wrote: post #19

How come the explanations offered for declining trust in media never seem to include the media demonstrably, provably getting things wrong in a way that logically ought to weaken trust?

Exactly. We all love a fun epistemological debate about truth and objectivity. But the whole field of journalism, first in academia and then in practice, used such philosophical questions to then intentionally abandoned the goals of objectivity. Today searching for objective journalism yields only articles about how it's a myth and there never was such a thing.

Sure, we all understand that biases exist and perfect objectivity can never be achieved. But today schools and newsrooms teach journalism as advocacy for causes and effecting change, and no longer even aim for objectivity.

Are we really surprised or disappointed that people finally figured out that they're being preached to, not informed, by most modern "journalism?"

Re: Scapegoating the Algorithm

#28

Post by jrussino »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #11

America has been in a class war since the beginning. It just refuses to call it that. Yet each time it plays out on the battlefield of truth: who gets to decide what's real? Each era has its own aristocracy - who produces knowledge, and clergy disseminating knowledge and legitimizing who gets to produce it. Phase One: 1770s The fight was colonial gentry vs. hereditary nobility. Knowledge still lived with the elite, b…

> Cold War era crowns scientists, engineers, policy wonks as aristocracy. Broadcasting elites as clergy legitimize the scientific consensus.

> Aristocracy (from Ancient Greek ἀριστοκρατίᾱ (aristokratíā) 'rule of the best'; from ἄριστος (áristos) 'best' and κράτος (krátos) 'power, strength') is a form of government that places power in the hands of a small, privileged ruling class, the aristocrats. [1]

It seems plain to me that in no sense have "scientists, engineers, policy wonks" been the "privileged ruling class" in the USA.

Senators and presidents and the executives and board members of multinational corporations and other large institutions are the "elite ruling class" you're looking for, and they're not scientists and engineers and academics...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristocracy

Re: Scapegoating the Algorithm

#29

Post by Nevermark »

zahlman wrote: post #19

How come the explanations offered for declining trust in media never seem to include the media demonstrably, provably getting things wrong in a way that logically ought to weaken trust?

That darn media, those scientists, and apolitical experts, oh don't get me talking about credible experts, all making mistakes!

What is worse they admit it, even have systems for correcting errors publicly, so all those mistakes really get pushed in all our faces.

Meanwhile the boutique/ideology/personality/opinion based media...

Re: Scapegoating the Algorithm

#30

Post by thrance »

wilg wrote: post #26
thrance wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classes are defined by their differing and opposing interests. By definition then, there can be no alignment between them. Capital owners want more labor for less capital, workers want more capital for less labor.

Doesn't sound like a very useful definition!

Why? It explains a lot about society and it holds perfectly. That's the definition of a good definition. What's your definition of economic classes?

There is an internal contradiction within our capitalist systems, some people live by selling their labors for wages, and some by leasing their capital for labor (to get more capital). Evidently those two interests are opposed, and ergo leads to issues when one side gains two much power over the other, because the power imbalance is very much not self-correcting.

Classes are used to refer to these groups of opposing intersts. There would be no need for classes if there was no conflict. Things only exist in their opposition to other things.

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