domain:infonomena.substack.com
faceh
1hr ago
I agree.
But I also am aware that we SEE the group that is addicted to social media, they're the ones you encounter on the social media sites. People who avoid it are, almost by definition, less legible to us here online. I could be underestimating how many people are able to switch off.
striker
2hr ago
Bad phrasing. Basically:
- Old Twitter was almost always additive and became almost indispensable over many years.
- New X (and lots of the other platforms have gone the same way) has followed the style of building the most addicting experience fuelled by extreme emotional response. Fairly sure TikTok started this c. 2019/20 and it was so successful all the others thought they had to follow.
dragonfly
2hr ago
Looking at social media, I predict the "AI-vulnerable" will be the massively larger group. Maybe the inability to even pretend there's a human connection will put people off, but I'm not counting on it.
oats_son
2hr ago
I don't know if I mentioned this elsewhere but I'm not looking to date right now because I still have not moved out yet. I got a job and paid off all my debts, but I have not moved out yet. That said, more practice making friends quickly will be helpful, so I will be re-joining the gym soon, both for that and also to lift weights diligently because I gave up learning languages and find that I have a ton of extra time. Also I'm going to be trying both the social connection strategy and the dating app strategy at the same time, because they complement each other.
I don't know if I like the advice to start martial arts. I took Tae Kwon Do from 10 years old to 16 years old. When I was a kid, Tae Kwon Do was simple fun, and you got McDonald's afterwards. But starting at about 15, my brother and I were the only adult males in the class; all the other postpubescent males had quit in the years previous. Whenever we sparred, it was him and me; I discovered the first incidence of male rage in these sparring matches. If I took a direct blow to my (padded) head, or experienced some other minor ass-kicking, I found that I was so angry afterwards that I could not speak, otherwise I would reveal the tears that had involuntarily welled up in my throat. This was how it was in most tournaments. I do not like this feeling. I felt the same feeling playing baseball in my senior year, when I was 18; I never even played catch with anyone before, so it was a sharp learning curve, and I don't think I did poorly in those circumstances, but I failed a lot and continued to misplay for the admittedly pretty bad baseball team, and every time I was the source of a bad inning, I would get very mad. I remember more than one game, we would all get in a circle and take a knee, and my face was involuntarily contorting itself in sheer rage. No tears that time, though.
I dunno. Maybe I'm mature enough to handle it now. I don't get mad at Tarkov or DayZ like I might have, and those fill me with adrenaline. But I do get mad and start shaking due to nerves if I break up my dogs fighting and one of them bites my arm in the chaos, though it doesn't help that I consider their continued fighting to be an unresolved serious issue creating tension in my life.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
It was actually "Substack" all along, but I was acting like it's a slur.
dragonfly
2hr ago
It's unclear why you think they wouldn't be able to use a slogan. I feel like rebranding to "Open Ideas" will take significantly more effort than for an empty dismissal slogan countering it to spread. "Open Ideas doesn't mean Hate Speech" or whatever sticks.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Yup, that or nationalize them outright, or provide a public platform.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
And I say this as someone who thought Jack’s original app, from ~2010 and right up to the way it introduced dissenting voices during COVID-19, provided an indispensable service to humanity.
I'm not seeing how this particular belief would increase your credibility on the issue.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
With a nod to the disappointment of @TwiceHuman (and others) I am enjoying immensely the ones of these I've read so far, and actually many I somehow missed the first go-around. The AAQC thread is one of the goodest features here.
(I intentionally didn't write best to spite my phone keyboard, which kept giving me shit as I tried to type. Take that, Xperia.)
striker
2hr ago
I deactivated twitter/x a few months ago. Got tempted back in last week and went through the ordeal of solving 10 visual puzzles (weirdly cryptic and very difficult) to prove I was human. Within three minutes, and WITHOUT A SINGLE POINT OF PREFERENCE FROM ME (no likes, no comments, no follows…) I was being shown loathsome racist material. Somebody somewhere wants this to happen, and set it up precisely this way. The base algorithm of X is racist, bigoted, hateful, angry and divisive, and it’s radicalizing people’s opinions every second of every day. And I say this as someone who thought Jack’s original app, from ~2010 and right up to the way it introduced dissenting voices during COVID-19, provided an indispensable service to humanity. There was obvious censorship and bias that Elon set out to fix. But he’s made it 100 times worse in the opposite direction.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
So those who are against free speech on the basis of conflict theory are openly admitting that they don't believe that they have an advantage in the realm of ideas.
Not so simple. It's pretty trivial to come up with justifications why my ideas are good but not immediately obvious. For example, I believe my ideas tend to be good in the lonf term, but inferior ideas are more appealing in the short term, and that there's a lot of people with high time preference. A progressive, on the other hand, might believe that someone's bigotry might prevent them from trying something, but once they do, it turns out to be not so bad (see for example "but have you considered the Irish" arguments when immigration is brought up).
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2hr ago
Fine, I'll show you where the bodies are buried.
The Obama administration was shaking down companies, and structuring the settlements to fund left wing NGOs So for example, Eric Holder as Attorney General sued Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and others, and funneled the settlements through a structure that allowed these companies to pay less if instead of paying the government, they paid leftwing NGOs like ACORN, National Council of La Raza, National Urban League, National Community Reinvestment Coalition, etc.
Picking on the National Urban League, they took this money (or some of this money, money is fungible) and used it to fight Trump in court repeatedly. Here they are in 2020 suing Trump, again in 2025. Oh, and here they were in 2020 suing the administration over how the census was being conducted, resulting in immigration status being excluded from the census. That was pretty significant. Really changes the electoral map.
So you see, by shaking down big banks during the Obama administration, through a structured settlement program, Democrats were able to use federal resources to launder their policy goals beyond the mere 8 years of their administration. I want Republicans to do exactly this. Only instead of big banks, I want them to sue Universities, force them to settle exactly the same way Eric Holder did with malicious prosecution, and then structure those settlements such that they are forced to fund right wing NGOs that will continue to fight for those policy goals after Trump is out of office. Just the same way the National Urban League did for Obama even after he was out of office.
And if you still think this is all too vague, too wishy washy, not even the concepts of a plan, with all these specific, cited, historical examples, I don't know what to tell you.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
2hr ago
I thought he was writing Shittack.
striker
2hr ago
I agree. And surely it can’t be far away from legislation that forces tech platforms to give users control over (or at least MUCH more transparency about) the algorithm used.
It’s impossible to consider that the tech cos will do this themselves. They would be slaughtering the greatest golden goose that ever was. Their hand must be forced.
faceh
2hr ago
I mean, I did study it.
Hume kind of demolished the idea that we can ever achieve certainty regardless of how airtight our arguments seem.
You still get some brave souls trying to swap an ought for an is, and acting like I wouldn't notice.
faceh
2hr ago
Personally I think we're going to see (are seeing) a bifurcation in those who are hopelessly taken in/addicted to the AI's sway, and those who do see it more as a mere instrumental affordance for achieving certain goals, that they can still turn away from to enjoy real world activities and interactions.
I don't know which of these groups will end up being larger, but I'd bet that the AI-vulnerable are around 60% of the U.S. population.
I also was looking forward to a team of maybe 10 people making a legit billion dollar company and this paving the way for groups of 3 - 5 friends running thousands of $10 + $50 million dollar companies.
This is a very nice dream, and maybe for a brief period of time it will be possible, but alas we are all but training data for the model so by running such a business via their systems, we'll be teaching the system how to run the businesses without us. I don't see how it ends up any other way.
cjet79
2hr ago
Just to be surei understand you, do you believe in a right to self defense?
Like are we disagreeing that this is a fundamental right, or are we just quibbling about whether guns fall into an extension of that right?
For example, if what for me looks like innocent religious worship to which I am entitled through natural rights looks to you like depraved demon-calling which threatens the lives of your neighborhood, you would well be within your rights to use violence to stop me, and I would well be within my rights to use violence to oppose you.
Solve for equilibrium, and this is roughly equivalent to saying that there is only one right, which is to use violence to do whatever you want.
This is absolutely not the equilibrium. If we are gonna use the terms of economics I'd say there are very high transaction costs for violence.
The equilibrium is more like: you can use violence or the threat of violence to protect a few things that you greatly care about. The things you can protect or enact with violence are heavily limited by what others are willing to protect with violence.
striker
2hr ago
Agree with this, for sure. When I say “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom of reach”, I don’t at all mean you should be thrown off the platform. What I do mean is the platform has no obligation to algorithmically promote what you say to other people on the internet.
The people who follow you is an interesting question, and a much thornier one for Internet user preferences.
-
There’s too much content, and we “follow” too many accounts, for reverse-chronological content to work. If it ever worked, it certainly cannot work now, with AI helping everyone pump out 10x to 100x more content and content variations than before. So there’s just too much. Some sorting algorithm is required but…
-
I hate the algorithms. They act like crack and plug me in intravenously (figuratively speaking) to the brain-rotting content I can’t stop myself from consuming. I know I am better off without the algorithms (as they’ve evolved in 2022-25). In 2016-21, the algorithms brought me interesting, heterodox ideas and content, and I was psychologically and epistemologically better off as a result. That has flipped since 2022 on almost every platform. (YouTube seems to be an exception.)
striker
2hr ago
Algorithms are supposed to personalize your feed so that content you're interested in is shown to you
This is obviously wishful thinking. We don’t own the algorithms. The tech companies that own the platforms own the algorithms. Companies operate in service of shareholder value. Therefore algorithms are constructed for the set of events, circumstances and behaviours that creates most shareholder value. Definitely not for you or me, no matter how many “For You” tabs you see.
The point stands. You can say whatever you want. No media / social media company is obliged to take that and bring it to one or a hundred or a million other people.
Also – and this is the most important point of all - having the freedom to say whatever you want is good, because you might win someone (or a whole society) over to your way of thinking. But if the opposite happens, and someone or society decides you’re a crackpot and they don’t want to hear from you ever again, that’s okay too. The one who listens has as much freedom as the one who speaks.
Broadly, the anti-free-speech perspective is that ‘having an advantage in the realm of ideas’ != ‘having an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas’.
Indeed, and the immediate obvious question this raises is, "Did this idea propagate to me because it has an advantage in the realm of ideas, or because it has an advantage in the realm of propagating ideas?" I could embrace hubris, declare that I'm the one who won't get zombified if bit, the one where when I complain that the umpire's strike zone is too big when my favorite baseball team is on offense, it's because the ump's zone really is too big, the one that can truly reliably judge this idea as "better," not merely "better at propagating itself." In which case, I suppose just shutting down all opposing opinions and enforcing it with an iron fist seems like a pretty attractive solution. Of course, there's the issue that the idea that this is a viable solution could have propagated to me because it's good at propagating itself, even if it isn't actually good. And if I'm wrong on that, then my attempts to crush my enemies could be disastrous. So I'm cynically motivated to open up this idea to criticism, so as to tear away its weaknesses, harden its strengths, and make it more capable of crushing my enemies when implemented.
But also, if I decide that it matters to me that the ideas that I propagate are actually ideas that are better, not merely ones that were better at convincing me, then I should open up these ideas to quite a lot of criticism, certainly at least within the ballpark of what I would judge as "too much," because the fact that I already believe these ideas means that I can't be relied on not to underestimate how much criticism is warranted.
BahRamYou
3hr ago
Kind of. Compare "life" to a game though...
- You only get one chance to play, with permadeath. That means you have to be really, really careful and avoid taking risks.
- No fast travel. It takes forever just to get anywhere
- There's only one server and way too many players, so all the best stuff has massive queues
- It's been running a long time, so a lot of stuff is dominated by powergames and guilds who started long before you were ever born
- Completely OP, some stuff is just way better than other stuff, and if you choose wrong you're screwed
- Tons of trolling and toxic players who never get banned
- Most of us never get to fight or rule anything. We're just stuck grinding at a boring job
- Tons of random luck
I don't know, someone needs to revamp this "life"
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
3hr ago
I like people who engage with the messiness and admit to the limits of knowledge over those who claim to have it all reduced to smooth lines and platonic ideals with certainty.
You should certainly make an effort to study philosophy then! It's right up your alley. (The tradition of philosophers tearing down Platonic ideals goes back to at least Plato.)
TeknOShEeP
3hr ago
Engage maximum cynacism mode! No nukes are needed. In fact, nukes are overrated. Two squadrons of B-52s can drop the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb via conventional ordnance, except those can all be individually targeted down to an arbitrarily precise degree as smart bombs, and so are actually far more devastating. 80% of Iraq's oil is clustered in the southeast, you just blow any civilization near them off of the map, occupy the oil fields, and declare a 200km buffer zone between your occupation area on top of the oil fields and the rest of Iraq. Anything or anyone that enters the buffer zone will be destroyed without warning.
Literal robbery? Absolutely. But perhaps more humane in the long run that the almost quarter-century clusterfuck we have now.
07mk
3hr ago
You discuss school and jobs, but I don't think any of that applies to entertainment media. Yes, it's usually good that we force children to go to school. It might even be good if we were to force adults to go to work, even ones that are independently wealthy or happy enough to subsist on welfare. But entertainment media? We currently have no way of forcing adults to watch certain pieces of media that we think would be good for them. Adults have pretty free choice - today more than ever - to seek out entertainment media as they wish, and though "high art" stuff are very very niche, they're still a significant niche.
This indicates that people actually seek this stuff out voluntarily. Where I see gen-AI being a boon for this is that we can have far higher throughput of art that is considered "good" by whatever "high art" standards are held by people with taste and discernment and [whatever characteristic that true connoisseurs have], and also for far more custom artworks that provide exactly the right amount of challenge to enrich someone's life without being so challenging as to make them shut down and reject it.
And building on that, there's also the fact that it's quite possible to train AI on media that makes people go, "I expected that to be really bad, but it barely piqued my interest enough to check it out, and I'm glad I did," versus ones that make people go, "I expected that to be really bad, and there was nothing about it that piqued my interest, so I decided not to check it out," versus ones that make people go, "I expected that to be really bad, but it barely piqued my interest enough to check it out, and I regret doing so," as well as many other combinations of similar concepts. And I don't see why some near-future gen-AI couldn't generate media that creates reactions similar to the first one while avoiding the latter ones fairly consistently.
Oh, I know, that's the joke/point : This is specifically eastern orthodox, not christianity in general. Neither the catholics nor mainline protestant churches I'm aware of would sign off that statement. If anything, they'd consider it a dramatic misunderstanding, not just a minor point of contention.
More options
Context Copy link