
Designing Social Systems Without Causing Depression and War - mpweiher
https://medium.com/what-to-build/how-to-design-social-systems-without-causing-depression-and-war-3c3f8e0226d1
======
cirgue
This article and this comment thread are prime examples of why the tech
industry needs social science and humanities. There are literally centuries of
human though and decades of experimentation that addresses this problem, and
the constant throughout history is that it is is both hard and complicated.

~~~
bbctol
Co-signed, especially the idea that studying the humanities is useful even
though (in fact because) the conclusion they give is often that these problems
are hard and complicated. The most common reason I find myself wishing people
approaching these problems in tech formally studied humanities is not because
the humanities have "the answer" but because if _you_ think you have an
answer, it's almost certainly been thought of before, and analyzed for
decades.

Not reading admittedly boring and often inane philosophical books and instead
trying to build your philosophy from first principles... tends to lead to
whatever philosophy was created 50 years ago and has now permeated culture.
Like how for a while, every geek I knew trying to re-invent moral philosophy
ended up at utilitarianism, only to find out that the good counter-arguments
had been made a long time ago; these days, people thinking about the internet,
social pressure, and the nature of reality seem to be slowly re-inventing
Foucault and Baudrillard without daring to touch the confusing French texts.

~~~
geoffreyhale
"every geek I knew trying to re-invent moral philosophy ended up at
utilitarianism, only to find out that the good counter-arguments had been made
a long time ago"

And kudos for overall quality post.

------
uoaei
Good and ethical behavior should be incentivized, both on short and long
timescales. It is obviously not enough to punish the wrongdoers, because our
laws don't prevent everyone from killing, discriminating, or exploiting their
fellow people.

Currently so much rides on mere survival that the only effective objective
function we have to consider our actions is that of money. Either the
capitalist system needs to be diversified to encourage multi-objective
optimization wrt quality of life across all lifeforms, or it needs to be
dismantled and another form of cooperation that directly incentivizes helping
your fellow human/animal survive should be installed.

Think about it like this: rather than writing some complicated optimization
algorithm that sometimes climbs hills and sometimes descends them according to
some arbitrary judgment scheme, we redesign the objective function so that all
ethical behavior lies along stable manifolds. We can effectively hack human
psychology by exploiting its predispositions to incentivize ultimately good
behavior.

This "good behavior" doesn't even necessarily need to be complex or
controversial: something as simple as the Golden Rule would likely be
sufficient.

E: to add that I recently attended a contemporary art exhibition where one of
the exhibits was the introduction of a new cryptocurrency called
Kineticoin[1], which supposedly awards artistic contributions to society. How
exactly to distribute this value is up for debate, but it is a sorely needed
one, IMO.

[1] [https://kineticoin.weebly.com/](https://kineticoin.weebly.com/)

~~~
qazpot
I have a few questions for you

Who gets to decide what is "Good" and "Ethical" behavior ?

What exactly would be the "incentive" "Good" and "Ethical" behavior. ? You say
that capitalism can be dismantled in favor of another form cooperation that
directly incentivizes helping your fellow human survive. Is this not in direct
contradiction the base animal instinct of self survival. The incentive would
have to be huge in order to override this base instinct.

You suggest Golden Rule as sufficient way to define "good behavior". But
Golden Rule itself has shortcomings and criticism
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule#Criticism)).
Do you have any sufficient argument against these criticism.

~~~
liberte82
I like the Inverse Golden Rule - Do not do unto others as you would not have
them do unto you.

~~~
logfromblammo
That's the Silver Rule: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to others."

Sometimes reformulated as "An it harm none, do as ye list."

------
gregknicholson
I think it boils down to 2 options:

1\. Persuade people to choose to be kind.

2\. Manipulate people so that they act in a kind way (or avoid acting in an
unkind way), without necessarily wanting to be kind.

Option 1 means you need a good way to remove unkind people from your own
experience (“free listening”). This is typically not popular with commercial
social network services, because this lets you ignore adverts too.

Option 2 reduces this need, but leads to the problem of who is “allowed” to do
the manipulation, and who decides this?

When communicating in person, most people have years of learned behaviour
(learned from millennia of social norms) nudging them towards acting kindly
(or at least not actively unkind), because in person there are immediate,
unavoidable social consequences. These consequences are absent when
communicating remotely, such as via the internet. I'll let you decide for
yourself whether this counts as option 1 or option 2.

~~~
indigochill
I don't understand your criticism of option 1. As a Facebook user, I can
remove anyone I want from my feed either by "unfriending" them or simply
unsubscribing from their feed. Ads are not people so Facebook doesn't provide
a facility for unsubscribing from them (and I assume they do some kind of
curation on them since they generally seem of decent enough quality for
internet ads). Of course, I use an ad blocker to ignore them anyway, but
that's beside my lack of understanding of your criticism.

To your criticism of option two, I think this is the fundamental flaw in the
goal of engineered social systems. There are groups which have radically
different ideas about what is "kind". Extreme religious fanatics would say
it's unkind to let someone "live in sin", so extreme measures are considered
kind for the spiritual well-being of the individual and the community. Secular
western thought is more interested in material well-being, so it would say
kindness is the promotion of the material well-being of others, generally
without passing judgment on how they choose to live (except insofar as it
violates others' material well-being).

So the decision of who decides what's kind can lead to completely different
interpretations of what kindness is and how the social system behaves.

~~~
circlefavshape
I think you're conflating "kind" with "moral" here. I've never heard of a
religious person justifying censure of a sinner based on kindness

------
JepZ
Actually, I find it interesting how HN incentivizes good behavior with their
karma system. Yes, HN discussions are most of the time not about social
values, but nevertheless I found that it changed me a bit, so that I think
more about how to write my comments.

So what I like about the system, is that (for experienced users) down voting
is allowed and that a down voted comment is getting less attention (less karma
damage, less reader damage) and that is getting faded out (so while reading
comments you can quickly skip the bad comments).

That way, you don't have to be afraid of writing a bad comment accidentally,
because the system takes care of it, but when you write one you can see that
that less people are reading it compared to a good one. I just wish down
voting would require writing an answer. Nothing is more frustrating than a
down voted comment when you do not know why people didn't like it.

Over the past years, I found that other readers like comments which tell them
something new and insightful about the topic. Links for further reading and as
references for opinions are also appreciated.

~~~
aaron-lebo
To be contrary, I find HN/Reddit point systems to be related to the
degradation of discussion. It's a popularity contest. Good comments do not
always get upvoted (in fact, they may be downvoted because people don't want
to hear it). But salacious and ill-informed stuff gets upvoted a lot.

You very quickly get hive minded behavior: similar beliefs get upvoted,
contrary ones get hidden, so soon enough you've got an echo chamber, powered
by worthless Internet points.

It's a very basic hack on our psychology - we like points, but maybe it's not
alltogether good. It works ok on HN because it's a decent community with
moderation intended to keep the discussion good. But Twitter and most
subreddits are horrible abuses of this and I'm not sure people would spend so
much time arguing on the Internet if they simply weren't rewarded so directly
for doing so.

~~~
Bartweiss
I frequently see people describe HN and Reddit as 'fickle' or 'hypocritical'.
But the underlying pattern seems to be a nasty consequence of point-based
ordering: whatever comes first does best.

There are some great breakdowns of Reddit comment karma by time after post.
The direction is obvious - earlier comments score better - but the exponential
falloff is still a sight to behold. Any view that isn't outrageous enough to
downvote heavily can win just by arriving first, being seen most, and being
upvoted by commenters trying to increase their own engagement. (HN removes
'downvote' when people reply to you. I wonder if it should discount upvotes on
comments you reply to?)

It's a less-trolled system than the open queue of a messageboard, and more
conversational than the obscure branching pattern of Twitter or Tumblr. But
it's not much good for comprehensive, noninflammatory discussion.

~~~
smallnamespace
That is somewhat negated by the fact that dissenting users from a post with a
'skewed' comment section can often go make their own post in response. This
happens rather more frequently on Reddit than here since HN discourages
duplicate posting on a topic.

~~~
j_s
> _HN discourages duplicate posting on a topic_

I would grudgingly agree, but found it funny that the following example sat on
the front page the same day as your comment, and the second post exceeded the
original's points & comments!

It is possible to detect and block Chrome headless |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175646](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175646)
(currently 146 points, 105 comments)

9 hours later: It is not possible to detect and block Chrome headless |
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16179181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16179181)
(currently 341 points, 158 comments)

------
golemotron
The article doesn't dare touch on the idea that online communities may
actually be detrimental to good social interaction. We evolved for face-to-
face. In-person relationships are rich, rewarding and not as prone to
miscommunication.

------
indubitable
I don't think it can be taken as an assumption that "social systems" in the
digital space can exist as a net social positive. The most fundamental problem
in all groups is that 'well received' messages are far different than 'good'
messages. And the feedback and filtering mechanisms in all current digital
social systems strongly incentivize the former over the latter. And I don't
think there's any particularly good way to solve this. Even in real life large
purposeless gatherings of mostly bored people rarely leads to desirable
things.

------
ngcc_hk
It is unnatural and inhuman ... hence any social system that root out this is
bad. Accept what we are and deal with it squarely. Escape is not a solution.

~~~
betimsl
Maybe this is one way/method to deal with it? Squarely?

------
lifeisstillgood
I am convinced of the future existence of MOOPs - massive online open
psychology - where we aggregate the daily actions of millions (arguing with
children, discussions with the boss, food choices etc) and look for patterns
and better choices for each of us at the upcoming moment (Siri, what is the
best way to tell my wife her bum does look big in that, ... based on 500,000
similar conversations, the best 1% responses were when the phrase "xxx" was
used)

This is feeling similar - that we need or want our virtual environment to help
us - in practise sessions as he seems to say, or in advice

It seems we want science, but at the level of our personal, everyday, choices.
we want to trust our computing environments have our best interests at heart.

and that kind of means no commercial interests can be involved.

~~~
bmomb
I think a world in this scenario is pretty much a dystopia.

If every person chooses for the better response and action given the a
situation how can a individual be unique?

If all husbands reply to a bum in the exactly same way why do you really need
a husband? Failing is a big part of being human, sometimes that can cause harm
but failing and learning is one of ours core functions.

I rather be good than be you?

(Sorry if i made my post a bit 'agressive', its not my intent, english is not
my main language and i still have to learn how to write properly)

~~~
nine_k
In your definition, being unique is being unlike others, so you are heavily
shaped by others already, trying to squeeze in to a niche not yet claimed. I
don't see how being forced to be unlike others is any better than being forced
to be like others: you're being forced either way.

Also, I don't think that asking for advice removes agency. You still have to
think if the advice is applicable to your unique situation, how can it be
modified to fit better, and which of several conflicting pieces of advice has
more merit. An advice from Siri on any life situation is nigh useless without
a deeper understanding of the situation, a Siri can't have it unless she lived
a big chunk of your life. So, armed with whatever advice, you still remain
ultimately responsible.

~~~
bmomb
I think that the uniqueness is not defined by being unlike others but by being
on your on, when yourself process the sintuation and decide to follow it.

And for your second argument, it’s just to easy to follow the computers
“orders”, a lot of people would just go for the order because it’s already
justified, something along the lines of “I would do different, but the machine
told me that everyone that on in that way get something wrong”.

I agree that this type of software would be good when one needs advices, but
it would have to be complete trustworthy, giving wrong advices to a suicidal
person by example can be devastating (and in this case not even thinking about
the manipulation that would be possible by the corporation).

