
Building Better Algorithms Requires Human Judgment and Values - Osiris30
http://continuations.com/post/149648883415/building-better-algorithms-requires-human-judgment
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mrspeaker
I agree with the article, but reading it reminded me a bit of this passage
from a (late-1970s?) book detailing why computers will never beat humans at
chess:
[https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/751493208299929600](https://twitter.com/mrspeaker/status/751493208299929600)

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meira
Obviously. All algorithms come from human judgment. There is no such thing as
"AI". It is all human intelligence (or to be more precise, developers
intelligence), after all.

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davidivadavid
The idea of the "Opposite View" is so naive that I can't really believe
anybody would imagine it can convince anyone of anything. Have they never had
an argument in real life?

It also seems to ignore something even more fundamental: people plain and
simple _do not like_ engaging with the "opposite view". Cognitive dissonance
is painful. People will always avoid it.

Am I advocating people stay in their "bubble"? Kind of.

In fact, it's become a fairly firm belief of mine that the social network to
upend Facebook et al. (if any) will be based on a) creating bubbles around
different groups based on "mood affiliation" or some other sort of behavioral
likeness b) create a smart topology around those groups to minimize intra-
group infighting while maximizing overall information serendipity (i.e. filter
"opposing view" information to provide me with _just the right information_
that I'm missing to complete my personal view, not the crap that's going to
enrage me).

The underlying issue that never seems to be fully explained here, and the
reason why I'm bullish on the "Balkans" model (nicely coined term, but hardly
neutral) social networks is simple: bounded rationality. Unless we come up
with brain augmentation devices that allow us to consume more and more
information, we're limited in the amount of information we can consume, and
filtering information intelligently is the only way for us to maximize the
utility of this information. Ergo, halving your information consumption to see
things from the other side only (assuming there's only 2 sides...) works if it
provides more value than consuming more information from the same side. So
far, I've never seen any compelling reason why it should (to echo a deleted
comment, I can't see how reading an InfoWars article after reading a HuffPo
editorial is going to do much for me). So there will always be a form of
"observable information universe" with boundaries defined by our capacity to
ingest information.

It seems to me many people have a huge blind spot/bias against "filter
bubbles" because they refuse to even entertain the idea that they could be
incredibly valuable. That's probably because most of the material written on
the subject so far (e.g. the Eli Pariser book) are hopelessly simplistic and
seem to ignore how people actually behave w.r.t to the information they
consume (to summarize: analyse everything through the lens of "viewpoints" and
"opposing viewpoints", politicize all information consumption, etc. What if
I'm mostly reading math articles on the web? Do I need to read the ones that
claim that 2+2 != 4?).

Now, although the "Opposite view" idea seems, frankly, dumb to me, there may
be a way to make a lot more interesting: give me the "Nearest but slightly
different view". That to me would be a far more serious contender to broaden
people's view of a topic effectively.

And I have a hunch that such a thing likely won't be shared by someone with an
"Opposite viewpoint". It will come from within the "filter bubble".

~~~
bbctol
I hacked together a (very, very, very rough) "opposing view reader" for myself
before I had heard of this idea; it pulled data from Pew's 2014 political
spectrum of news sources ([http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-
polarization/](http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/))
and served me a randomized news source each day, weighted on a bell curve
around where I already was (so I mostly got "nearest but slightly different
views.") The problem was... it was boring, not very useful for staying
informed, and I basically just ignored every time Fox news showed up.

There needs to be some way to incentivize people to _actually_ read the
"opposing view" and take it seriously; in my experience, most people who claim
to be reading the opposing view are still using it to prop up their own
conclusions, and not dealing with it on its own terms. The abstract benefits
that people talk about from seeing diverse media are always outweighed, on an
individual level, by how annoying it is to listen to people who seem obviously
wrong!

I'm very glad I did debate in high school; as weird and silly a world as that
is, it does provide a legitimate, strong incentive to understand both sides of
an argument well enough to convince a third party, and practicing at it made
me much more skeptical and (I like to think?) nuanced. I don't think there's
any way to move an incentive like that to "real life," but it is a very
interesting exercise to try to understand another viewpoint well enough you
could convince someone of it, even if it's hard to take the exercise seriously
without a shiny trophy resting on it.

