Tag: Social Media

There Are Two Kinds of Extremists

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized2 Comments

J.D. Vance once made the observation that the real danger of social media isn’t living in an echo chamber, it’s only being exposed to the most extreme versions of the positions of people who disagree with us. I think that this is an important insight, and speaks to how it is important to seek out the reasonable version of extreme views that we see made fun of. That said, there are two kinds of extremists, and the more reasonable version is only important for one of them.

Let’s start with that kind: the extremist who is a monomaniac. This kind of extremist is extreme because he has abandoned most kinds of good in life and cares only about one kind of good. To make up an example so as to not be accidentally controversial, let us suppose that there is a man who loves the color blue. If he merely loves blue, but loves other things as well, he may well have many blue things in his house but he will not seek to paint the whole world blue, because he knows that trees and grass need to be green, and have their own value. If he was a monomaniac in his love for blue, he would not recognize the good of grass and trees and so would not care that they need to be green to achieve it (I’m speaking of photosynthesis, not of their aesthetics), and so he would seek to pain the grass and trees green, and would kill them. This kind of extremist, though highly concentrated online, is rare in real life. Most people love more than one kind of goodness, and so no matter how much free reign they are given to realize their ideal world, they will balance out competing goods and not wreck the world. These kinds of reasonable people are important to seek out. (I should also note that this highly simplified form of extremist is not what one typically meets online; I need to explain the other kind before I can clarify further.)

The other kind of extremist is a man who is dedicated to a philosophy of life and is not afraid of the opinions of his fellow man, but takes his philosophy to its logical conclusion. This is the Catholic saint, the Protestant Puritan, the Buddhist ascetic, and the Soviet dictator. People who are not extremists of this kind are not people who balance out goods, but merely people who lack the courage of their convictions. They do not live out their philosophy of life, not because they think it lacks something, but because they lack something. Most of the time, it’s social sanction that they lack. That’s why, for this kind of extremist, it is precisely the extremists you should pay the most attention to. If society were ever to adopt their beliefs, it would become more like them.

Now that I’ve explained the second kind of extremist, I can describe where you are actually most likely to meet the first kind of extremist: as someone posing as the second kind of extremist. The technical term for this is a heretic, though it’s an unpopular word with baggage, so let’s stick to “monomaniacal extremist.” For that same reason I will avoid religious examples, so let’s take a secular one: environmentalism. There are plenty of people who want to take care of the planet on which we live in a balanced way. They consider measures to ensure that we don’t poison our water supply, but also consider other goods like industrial production, nice housing, having pets, growing food, and a myriad of other goods that need to balance each other out. Then you have the monomaniac who only loves nature where it has not been affected by human beings, and so champions anything that removes human influence, at the fullness of expression being the human self-extinction project.

This example also shows the importance of distinguishing the two types of extremist. On the one hand, it is important to figure out that the monomaniacal environmentalist merely hates people, he doesn’t love the environment as one good among many, and so he does not represent the views or policies or much of anything of the people who merely consider clean air and water and an interesting variety of wildlife to be goods to balance out among other goods. On the other hand, the people who are members of the human self-extinction project are merely the monomaniacal environmentalists with the courage of their convictions. One should not ignore the human self-extinction people and seek out the more moderate “strangle the economy with regulation” environmentalists because those are only distinguished from the human self-extinction people by being unwilling to say what they really mean.

You Can Tell Whether an (Older) Actor Has Died By His Profile Picture

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized3 Comments

Something I’ve noticed, when looking up the biographies of actors who are in movies or TV shows I’m researching, is that you can instantly tell whether an older actor has died by their profile picture. If their profile picture is often them looking old, they’re still alive. If they look young, they’ve died. This can be really fast, too. I confirmed that Angela Lansbury had died on the day I heard the news by going to her Wikipedia page and seeing that her profile pictures was of her when she was twenty five.

This makes a certain amount of sense, I think. So long as a person is alive, what they look like right now (for which what they looked like within the last few years will suffice) is what’s most important. But once they die, it makes sense that what was most characteristically them is what’s most important. But that does raise a question as to what is most characteristically that person. In Angela Lansbury’s case, her picture at twenty five certainly is more beautiful, in the sense of having smoother skin and looking far more fertile, than her at fifty nine (the age she was when Murder, She Wrote first aired). I’m not sure that she looked better (if sex appeal is not the sole criteria of beauty) at twenty five, and I think she was far more recognizable at fifty nine.

There are broader philosophical questions that this raises, of course, which the sort of people who choose profile pictures are probably not interested in, but it is curious to ask what picture is most representative of a person’s whole life. Naively one might answer them at the end of it, however old or young that was, because that is the summation of it. That’s not really true, though. Life has phases, and as we age we leave behind phases. If we lived well, we leave them behind completed, but if we survive long enough we will inevitably leave them behind. And then at some point we’re done with all of our phases and leave this life behind entirely. This is the point of memento mori: to remember that we’re in the prologue to life, not in the real story. It is not a tragedy that we leave phases of our life behind because we were only ever getting them ready for eternity. It would be a tragedy to prepare without end and never truly live with what has been prepared. (What this consummation in eternity of what is merely prepared in time will look like we cannot imagine, of course, since all we can imagine comes from our experience and this is unlike our experience.) But to return to the main subject: perhaps, then, the picture which most represents a person is a picture of them at the height of their powers.

It’s not a very practical question for people who do not select profile pictures for the dead, but it is none the less an interesting question.

Twitter Trending Is One of the Worst Ideas Ever

On By Christopher LansdownIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’ve talked before about how bad social media is (in its current forms) in Social Media is Doomed and talked about some ways to deal with it (in its current forms) in Staying Sane on Social Media. Today I want to talk a little bit about how Twitter Trending is either designed or might as well be designed to amplify the worst aspects of social media. (If you’re not familiar with it, Twitter Trending shows you a realtime-updated list of hot topics that a lot of people are discussing this minute.

Twitter Trending, since it is a snapshot of what is being discussed in high volumes, necessarily captures what people are not taking the time to think about. When people take time to think about a subject, they do not all take the same amount of time to think, and so they will not post at the same time. To post the same time, people must be posting almost immediately upon hearing about the subject. (There is some complex stochastic mathematics I’m oversimplifying, but the conclusion is the same.) To post upon hearing something, one must either be a subject matter expert who can instantly recognize context people will need in order to understand the hot topic, or else one must fool enough to think that one’s immediate, unthinking reaction is worth other people’s time. The latter will naturally predominate among the people posting immediately, for the simple reason that subject matter experts are rare.

So we have a collection of posts, mostly by fools. How to make this work? How about not using a criteria for what to show people which has nothing to do with quality. Most recent, most viewed, and most responded-to would all do well to give the highest likelihood of not getting the best tweets (or are they called xits, now?) without having to laboriously rate all of the tweets for quality then pick the lowest.

Now that we’ve selected what may well be the worst of the worst, and is at best the average of the worst, Twitter Trending now adds one more layer of awful: importance. The very act of showing people these randomly (with respect to quality) selected tweets makes them important. Since they’re likely to be the dumbest comments of fools, this will naturally spark outrage, because it is particularly bad when the worst fools have to offer is elevated within society. Worse still, Twitter Trending presents this, not as a window into the dregs of what humanity has to offer, but as something neutral. Since, among non-psychopaths, the default reason to call someone’s attention to something is because their life will be better for it, Twitter Trending implicitly calls this garbage, good.

Some day Twitter will be able to use AI to show people a curated feed of the worst things ever tweeted, but until then, Twitter Trending is about the closest humanity can currently come.

There is, however, some good news. At least if you use Chrome, or one of its derivatives, like Brave (which is what I use): Twitter Control Panel. It removes a bunch of the worst features of Twitter, as well as doing some other stuff I don’t much care about (mostly changing the rebranding of Twitter to X). It’s still social media, but it helps to limit the worst excesses of present-day social media.

(Note, because internet: so far as I know Twitter Control Panel is not a commercial enterprise and I have no affiliation with whoever it is who makes it.)

The Problem With Outrage Quoting

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, Uncategorized, Writing1 Comment

I’m fairly careful to limit my intake of social media to people who say reasonable things. This is in part a survival strategy for Staying Sane on Social Media. However, this still leaves a fairly large vector for things which unbalance my mood and make me less effective at the main stuff I’m supposed to be doing: outrage quoting.

This is where a person who is themselves reasonable sees a very unreasonable thing, then quotes it to express their outrage at it. There’s also a variation on this where the person quotes it to make fun of it. The latter isn’t quite as bad as the former, but both do have the following problem: one is still being exposed to the crazy stuff one was trying to avoid.

Actually, it’s a bit worse than that—the people one follows are specifically filtering through the stuff from the unreasonable people to find the craziest stuff that they say. This can be extremely unbalancing to one’s state of mind. As I talked about in Social Media is Doomed, human beings aren’t designed to deal with a large number of strangers. We deal with people by acclimating to them, but it takes time and is harder the more different sorts of people we need to acclimate to. Even when we are careful to keep our reading to a set group of people to whom we’ve acclimated—there’s no requirement that these people agree with each other or with us, only that we’ve acclimated to them—outrage quoting constantly introduces new people to our notice who are saying crazy things that we haven’t acclimated to. This is extremely stressful to human beings.

Also, please note that I’m not talking about being exposed to new ideas as being stressful. There are some circumstances in which that can be stressful, but usually it’s quite manageable. I’m talking about running into expressions of ideas we’re not used to. Perhaps we know somebody who will say #KillAllMen and we’ve gotten used to this eccentricity. There is no new argument to be found in a person saying, instead, #CastrateAllMen (I made that up; who knows, perhaps I will have actually come up with an absurd example that the universe didn’t beat me to for once). But if we’re used to the former and not the latter, the latter will be far more stressful to run into. There’s a new person here, and people are complex. They’re also dangerous. A stress reaction to having to deal with a new person is actually entirely appropriate. Best case scenario is a big drain on your emotional energy is incoming.

Except that this being a one-off quote means that actually, a big drain on one’s emotional energy isn’t incoming because you don’t actually need to get used to this new person. You’re almost certainly never going to see them again. And therein lies one strategy to help mitigate the stress from encountering outrage quoting: focus on how this is a person you’ll never see again and how they don’t really matter.

I don’t have any other good suggestions, other than be careful about people who do a lot of outrage quoting. But certainly I think the golden rule applies, here: be very careful when quoting to make sure that one isn’t outrage quoting. For example, when I wrote a humorous blog post about that CNN article on cuckolding (CNN’s Love of Cuckolding), I started it off with explaining why it doesn’t matter and isn’t worth stressing over. And I’ve stopped myself from quoting outrageous things often enough that it’s now becoming a habit to not quote outrageous things. Still, it’s something I always keep in mind—if I’m quoting something, what effect will seeing that have on the people who read what I write?

Facebook Had a Bad Year

On By Christopher LansdownIn Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Having recently talked about how Social Media is Doomed and Another Perspective on Facebook as Social Poison, I just saw this article: 2017 Was a Bad Year For Facebook, 2018 Will Be Worse.

The article is mostly about taxation, but it does mention this:

Facebook has reacted nervously to Palihapitya’s accusations, saying he hadn’t worked at the company for a long time (he left in 2011) and wasn’t aware of Facebook’s recent initiatives. But I can’t see any practical manifestations of these efforts as a user who has drastically cut back on social networking this year for the very reasons cited by Parker and Palihapitya.

To outsiders and regulators, Facebook looks like a dangerous provider of instant gratification in a space suddenly vital to the health of society. It’s also making abuse and aggression too easy — something the U.K. Committee on Standards in Public Life pointed out in a report published on Wednesday. Sounding one of the loudest alarm bells on social media yet, the panel urged the prime minister to back legislation to “shift the balance of liability for illegal content to the social media companies.”

The article also talks about concerns related to targeted advertising.

I haven’t talked about targeted advertising, but its problems are partially related to the problems of push-based social media. One part of targeted advertising is only showing advertisements to people who might want to see them. This is a net-positive for all involved, since irrelevant advertisements are just a waste of everyone’s time. The part that’s about figuring out how to manipulate people into buying things they don’t think are a good idea, though, is far worse. It’s also related to the fundamental problem of push-based media because it’s trying to get around the adaptations people made to their environment in order to live in peace with it. Unfortunately from the advertiser’s perspective, those adaptations involve a great deal of not buying things; and hence the temptation on the part of advertisers to upset that balance which the viewer has constructed for himself.

I’d like to reiterate that my point is not that social media is evil, but rather that the push-based social media as we know it today is fundamentally flawed for human use; this makes changes to it inevitable. What form those changes take is less clear, but they are certainly coming.

Another Perspective on Facebook as Social Poison

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized1 Comment

This is a follow-up to my posts Social Media is Doomed and Staying Sane on Social Media.

I ran into an article which discusses what a former facebook executive said about Facebook’s effect on people:

Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

He went on to describe an incident in India where hoax messages about kidnappings shared on WhatsApp led to the lynching of seven innocent people. “That’s what we’re dealing with,” said Palihapitiya. “And imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs.” He says he tries to use Facebook as little as possible, and that his children “aren’t allowed to use that shit.” He later adds, though, that he believes the company “overwhelmingly does good in the world.”

Here’s the original video, in case the article goes down, or if you’d like to verify The Verge’s description of what was said:

(I haven’t verified it myself, mostly because mention it as a good expression of a concern I already have, and not as information supporting a conclusion.)

The ability social media gives to people to form instant mobs is something I haven’t talked about yet, but it’s another major problem that social media brings with it. Mobs are dangerous things; technology which allows them for form more readily is certainly dangerous. There is yet another element of push-vs-pull social media at work, but only in degree. Pull-based social media (i.e. social media where you have to actively go look at someone’s feed rather than there feed being pushed in front of you) still drastically reduces the amount of energy necessary to whip up a mob, but not as much as push-based social media. (To recap: Facebook, Twitter, etc are push-based social media while blogs, etc. are pull-based social media.) Much of the difference comes from speed: in pull-based, you have to get others to go look at the inciting material, and they will get to it when they get to it. In push-based media people can repost/retweet/etc the inciting material and spread it much faster. The faster it spreads, the more people will be having an emotional reaction to it at the same time.

There is a flip side to the information hose that push-based media causes, though, which is that no one has a good enough memory to drink from the information fire hose of push-based social media and keep track of all the things to be outraged about. This mitigates against the online mob-forming tendencies of push-based social media, in that a mob’s ire will usually not be directed at any particular target for any great length of time. Burning something requires both intensity of heat as well as duration of the heat being applied; anything can withstand a blowtorch applied for only a ten-thousandth of a second. And in fact savvy miscreants are learning how to use this to their advantage in order to avoid blow-back from their misdeeds.

To be clear, it’s not that I think that push-based social media is an unalloyed evil; only that it is fundamentally incompatible with human nature. My contention is not that push-based social media is impossible to use well. My contention is that push-based social media is simply too much strain on a human being for human beings to continue using it in its current form. I don’t think that Facebook et al will die off, but rather transform into something with so many content-curation tools as to effectively be pull-based rather than push-based. I.e. they will become something dissimilar to what they are now, though possibly under the same name.

Social Media is Doomed

On By Christopher LansdownIn Uncategorized5 Comments

That’s a slightly click-baity title, so let me clarify: I mean social media not in the sense of all ways of talking with people on the internet of any kind, but rather the giant platforms people typically mean when they say “social media”: Facebook, Twitter, etc. And when I say doomed, I mean, in their current form. I strongly suspect that there will be a Facebook corporation (or whatever it’s called) in 50 years time.

Social media is currently organized around a push-model of media delivery. Basically, it uses notifications for when people say things to you. And it does this regardless of whether you know them or not. This is not long-term viable for human beings. Conflict is deeply stressful to us, and we’re reasonably good at settling into mutually acceptable patterns with people we regularly come into contact with—especially family members. Though even there, plenty of people aren’t good at it and these relationships don’t all last. push-based social media forces us into contact with people in a relatively intimate setting with whom we haven’t developed the patterns of interaction which let us be comfortable with each other. And that just doesn’t work.

People not wanting to argue with random strangers in an intimate way is often ridiculed as “wanting to seal oneself in an echo chamber” but it’s basic human nature: people don’t have the energy to accommodate themselves to a large number of people, and worse social media contacts are often quite temporary in nature. Developing a mutually accommodating relationship to a person is often a waste of energy because they disappear from one’s life in 6 months.

For this and other reasons, social media where you interact in an intimate way with people you should be interacting with in a formal way is a disaster. It is simply against human nature.

Of course when social networks are relatively young this doesn’t cause as many problems because the members of the network are self-selected and most people just don’t run into that many people. Thus the network gains a lot of strength of this not-long-term-viable approach in terms of early growth. But eventually the downsides emerge; Facebook, for example, has become an excellent way to hate your family, friends, and neighbors. It’s also, apparently, an excellent tool for kids to bully each other with, and especially for girls to bully other girls with. I won’t use facebook for basically any amount of money, but its addictive properties do keep many bound to it.

The result is very likely going to be the platform’s gradual shift away from push-notifications to pull-notifications. Push notifications for private direct messages, since that’s the same thing as mail, email, SMS messages, etc. But pull notifications for other things, like status updates. The other thing is that on more personal networks like Facebook, people are likely to generally adopt rules of politeness very similar to teatime rules—do not under any circumstance discuss contentious issues.

The problem from Facebook’s perspective, of course, is that this reduction in engagement is bad for their bank account. For at least a fair time they were experimenting with showing you the things other people liked, in addition to showing you what other people shared. That’s really what eventually drove me off of Facebook, actually. And I notice that Twitter is doing it too. In fact the twitter phone app as become basically unusuable because of it. Between that and their constantly showing me the “in case you missed it” tweets, the phone app has become dysfunctional. Sure, it’s serving twitter’s ends and not mine, but I’m getting close to uninstalling it, in which case it will serve no one’s ends. I’m a little odd in that I analyze this sort of thing, but I’m not odd in my reaction—people burn out all the time.

So when you put all this together, it’s an inherent problem social media faces—growth and maximum engagement are achieved only by running hard against human nature. And you can only do that for so long before human nature revolts. As I said, I don’t expect that Facebook and Twitter will all go out of business—heck, there’s still a MySpace for crying out loud—but I do think we’re going to see big changes.

Blogging, by the way, is far more in accord with human nature because it is a pull-type medium. You go to a blog and read it, or read it in your RSS reader (I use newsblur).  It is convenient to take or leave as you find interesting and useful. It does not, therefore, introduce demands that you accommodate yourself to someone who probably won’t be around in six months anyway.