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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28385 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Malcolm Gladwell is not highly regarded by hipster intellectuals. This is, no doubt, because hipsters often hear their "midwit" friends riff on Gladwell and thus form an antigen to such palatable fare. But while these hipsters go off to read Foucault or Nietzsche, trying to glean meaning from a fever dream, I think Gladwell actually has a lot of valuable stuff to say.

One of his ideas was the difference between a "mystery" and a "puzzle". Forget the choice of words, they don't matter. Gladwell defines them like this (paraphrased):

A puzzle is something for which you just need more information to get the answer. For example: The files are in the safe. You need the combination to the safe.

A mystery is something for which all the required information is present, but difficult to process. Examples: The prevention of scurvy, which was learned and lost several times.

One conceit that many people enjoy is the idea that a large conspiracy is impossible, because if even one person spills the beans, the jig is up. For example, keeping the AACS encryption key secret was impossible. One person spilled the beans and it was over.

But large conspiracies are not impossible. Many conspiracies continue to exist even when all or most information is publicly available. For example, there was a large scale effort to convince the public that Covid had a zoonotic origin. Perhaps it did, perhaps it didn't. But evidence in support of a lab leak was deliberately denigrated by nearly all authority figures. There was no need to maintain a secret channel of communication. Once consensus was established, peopled picked up the signals to stay on side, and ones who didn't were punished. The best evidence in favor of a lab leak (that the pandemic started near a lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses) was never secret. It was just not spoken of.

I'm taking a long time to get to the point but I recently discovered this remarkable Reddit thread. It's simply amazing that this is buried in a random AskReddit thread.

For context, /u/yishan is Yishan Wong, former CEO of Reddit. /u/samaltman is Sam Altman. At the time, he was still using capital letters and, in addition to his duties as head of Y Combinator, posting on /r/buttcoin.

In the thread, Yishan explains how Sam Altman used a series of leadership crises to essentially steal control of Reddit from its parent company Conde Nast. Sam Altman chimes in to admit that, yes, this is what happened and also to taunt Yishan.

Sound familiar?

Amazing that this information was never revealed or discussed in the recent takeover of OpenAI. Or maybe it was. But no one cared. It's revealing that Sam never even bothered to delete the thread. Information is only damaging when you have a competent media and one that wants to attack you. When they're on you're side, or they don't care, there is no need to hide anything. The OpenAI board was probably right about Sam, but the focus quickly became the behavior of the board. Slow clap.

I can’t see the thread so I am guessing it is now deleted/blocked but would be interesting to hear the story.

I can still see it. But I'll paste it here:

Yishan:

In 2006, reddit was sold to Conde Nast. It was soon obvious to many that the sale had been premature, the site was unmanaged and under-resourced under the old-media giant who simply didn't understand it and could never realize its full potential, so the founders and their allies in Y-Combinator (where reddit had been born) hatched an audacious plan to re-extract reddit from the clutches of the 100-year-old media conglomerate.

Together with Sam Altman, they recruited a young up-and-coming technology manager with social media credentials. Alexis, who was on the interview panel for the new reddit CEO, would reject all other candidates except this one. The manager was to insist as a condition of taking the job that Conde Nast would have to give up significant ownership of the company, first to employees by justifying the need for equity to be able to hire top talent, bringing in Silicon Valley insiders to help run the company. After continuing to grow the company, he would then further dilute Conde Nast's ownership by raising money from a syndicate of Silicon Valley investors led by Sam Altman, now the President of Y-Combinator itself, who in the process would take a seat on the board.

Once this was done, he and his team would manufacture a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises, forcing the new board to scramble to find a new CEO, allowing Altman to use his position on the board to advocate for the re-introduction of the old founders, installing them on the board and as CEO, thus returning the company to their control and relegating Conde Nast to a position as minority shareholder.

JUST KIDDING. There's no way that could happen.

Sam Altman:

Cool story bro.

Except I could never have predicted the part where you resigned on the spot :)

Other than that, child's play for me.

Thanks for the help. I mean, thanks for your service as CEO.

Not sure why it’s not working for me.

Anyway I had to look up Yishan Wong on Wikipedia and this paragraph I find hilarious

“In 2012, when asked about various controversial Reddit communities, Wong said that the site should offer a platform for objectionable content: "We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it."[10] In 2013, he hired Ellen Pao as the Vice President of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships and later recommended her as CEO.[11]”

Maybe Ellen Pao wasn’t quit the censorship type back then but the paragraph reads to me “We strongly support our Jewish community in X,Y,Z country we have therefore appointed our Secretary of State to be Adolf Hitler.” Either he truly believed what he said and just made an awful hirer or cultures of all involved in Reddit changed over time.

2012 - 2016 is when the SF tech industry switched from "free speech and neutrality are critical for our growth" to "kicking around our political enemies is a whole lot of fun". I think Obama's re-election campaign was the turning point.

Ellen Pao was probably always more comfortable with censoring and control. But in her actions she was just following the prevailing winds in SF.

I think Obama's re-election campaign was the turning point.

No, it was pretty clearly the Trump campaign. That was the empirical proof (in their minds) that free speech cannot suffice to ensure the triumph of good over evil. They kept expecting that the negative coverage, universal condemnations, and yes, polite conversations with Trump supporters would work. They didn't.

No, it was pretty clearly the Trump campaign.

No, it was not. It was 2014 at the latest. By the time Trump came around, the "freeze peach" people were in full control. See also, "Gamergate".

It wasn't the turning point (indeed, Trumpism was a reaction to SJ turning stifling), but They did escalate, a lot, when Trump showed up.

It wasn’t just gamergate. I think it roughly coincided with the end of a major growth phase in social media— around 2010 to 2015 it became clear that nearly everyone in the country was on some form of social media. The social media platforms no longer needed to attract users, they needed to attract advertisers. And advertisers want to have some control over what kinds of things appear on the same page as their ads, and don’t want to be guilty by association of unsavory content or opinions. A post that is racist in some way next to an ad for Coke gives the impression that Coke sponsors that racism.

I think it roughly coincided with the end of a major growth phase in social media

I think this is right, but...

The social media platforms no longer needed to attract users, they needed to attract advertisers.

...this is mostly wrong.

I think there are a couple of trends, one slow and one fast, which are relevant here and which coincided by apparent coincidence.

  1. (Fast) The normies showed up on the Internet, because smartphones. The political opinions of nerds are systematically different from the mainstream and tend toward liberalism (in the old, real sense, not the modern US perversion of the word); as such, when the Internet became less nerdy, this naturally encouraged a loss of liberalism. But also, the kinds of bullies and social climbers who make a hobby of shunning people suddenly got a tool for "instant outrage mob, just add spark"; this turned out to be a powerful weapon to cow people and send society in general into a less-liberal mode.
  2. (Slow) SJers were increasing in numbers. SJ is, in large part, what happens when you feed counterculture liberalism to a conservative-by-temperament. As such, this was a time bomb planted in the 60s and sprouted in the 90s, but it took until the 2010s for them to grow into politically-active teenagers.

I think that in the counterfactual that the counterculture did not exist, you'd have still seen a crackdown due to #1, but it'd have been with opposite political valence.

No, it wasn't just advertisers, though they were indeed captured and used what you said as an excuse (@ArjinFerman points out the evidence it is just an excuse below). They censored not just reddit but 4chan, which certainly never cared about advertisers.

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And advertisers want to have some control over what kinds of things appear on the same page as their ads, and don’t want to be guilty by association of unsavory content or opinions.

What's important to remember here, is that what they want is the control over expressed opinions, rather than ensuring there will be no negative impact on their bottom line. None of the guilt by association with "nazis" resulted in anyone's sales dropping, but resulted in massive restrictions on speech. Conversely the one advertising controversy that did cause a massive drop in sales - Dylan Mulvaney - resulted in no restrictions on speech.

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