What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up.
Considering how many reports there are of Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok, and other sites where content moderators are suffering from having to perform their jobs, it suggests that there's a great deal of really terrible stuff going on - and worse, that the people involved are filming and attempting to share it.
This is a serious thing, and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface. It also suggests that the apocalyptic movies may not be so far off when they suggest that humanity will revert to open barbarism if we're faced with a catastrophy large enough.
A relatively small percentage of people can post a lot of horrible stuff; TikTok has about 1 billion – BILLION – users who are active once a month. If only 1% of those people are fucked up, and they all post one fucked up thing a month then we'd be talking about 10 million videos/month.
I don't know how accurate that 1 billion number of users is exactly, but it's probably in the right ballpark. In reality there are probably a few million "serial posters" of horrible stuff. Either way, with numbers like that it's very easy to get millions of undisputedly horrible videos.
It wouldn't be 10 million videos/month, it would be 10 million active users. This is a notable difference because each of these users can be uploading numerous content and tiktok users who have posted content are much more likely to continue posting content far more frequently than just one video per month.
Theoretically it now does not seem too difficult that data science could actually identify who these people are based on the amount of metadata we all generate. Are there attempts to be preemptive in this regard?
The same kind of "data science" that associated many people and businesses named after the Egyptian goddess with an Islamic terror group and took automatic action against them?
I think we need to move to some way to identify actual people on the internet. I don't mean that in a "use your real name and upload your passport"-kind of way, but in a "we can 100% reliably tell you've been a twat in the past, whomever you are, so no new signups for you"-kind of way that also accounts for all the various interests such as right to privacy and anonymity.
Many platforms use phone numbers for that now, which is obviously far from perfect as I can easily get 100 of those today if I wanted to.
That's not a ludicrous idea. India requires activity be logged to a specific individual,
for instance. Seems a bit dystopian for my sensibilities though.
It doesn’t have to be that apocalyptic. Take the literal traffic enforcement for example. Driving faster than the speed limit gets traffic fines. Cities have cameras for red light or toll booth violations and have databases of offenders.
"Databases of offenders" is different from "database of people who haven't yet done anything but statistically we think might". I could be reading it wrong, but it sounded to me like the parent comment was talking about predicting people who might post such videos _before_ they did. I don't think you'd need to theorize about using data science to ban people after they post some number of violating videos.
Social media companies can be passive, reactive, proactive, or predictive in their efforts to ban bad actors. How much effort are they putting in at each level? It seems more towards the least effort.
Just because we can imagine it going wrong doesn't mean it will go wrong or it must go wrong. The role of science fiction is to explore possible futures, not to make the future taboo.
Do we need to be way more careful with how we design our society? Yes. Does it make sense to abandon possible solutions because of a movie? No.
>I don't know how accurate that 1 billion number of users is exactly
Ask Elon Musk to offer to buy it, then we'll see how accurate those numbers are.
In reality, I never believe people's published numbers. OF COURSE they are inflated. Their entire (maybe majority?) valuations are dependent on those numbers being as high as possible.
I didn't even check the source of those numbers; it was just the first thing that came up in a very quick search. It doesn't really matter: even with 500 million or 100 million you've got the same "a small percentage of a very large group can cause a lot of havoc"-effect. You see the same if you drive to work: you can easily encounter over a 100 of other drivers, and only a very small percentage of them can give the perception that "people are such bad drivers" when in fact it's just the 1% of the 100 people you encountered on that trip.
I find it both depressing and comforting; it's comforting to know most people aren't that bad, and it's depressing that such a small group of assholes can fuck it all up.
It doesn’t even matter — going back to the car example, say you drive near 1-2 thousand cars on an hour drive, if you have 2-3 scary experiences, that makes you think “drivers here suck!” So a sample size of like .1% makes you think a problem applies to 50% of drivers.
If I watch TikTok for an hour a day for a week, and I watch 4 videos/minute on average, I’ll watch over 1500 videos a week. If only one or two of those are VERY traumatizing (e.g. showing death), I’d think TikTok has a big moderation problem. That’s an ultra-low number of users making it seem like there is a huge issue
Bytedance is pre-IPO. However, you are accusing Google, Facebook, snapchat, Twitter of securities fraud. What is the latest from Musk, on Twitter's alleged securities fraud?
I'm not accusing anyone of anything other than padding their numbers. How you interpret that is up to you.
Do you really believe TikTok as exactly 1 Billion users, or 999,990,000+ users? Anyone that says that is 1 Billion is padding the numbers. Nobody is going to call that 999 million.
If the number is anything close to being rounded, the number is padded. Unless they are showing you an exact number from the time the count was read, it is being padded.
TikTok having an estimated 1bn users is quite low when you compare it to the likes of Google's YouTube at twice that (2.5bn). If anything I expected TikTok to have passed the 2bn mark already considering its reach, most notably surpassed by Meta's subsidiaries and YouTube.
I actually think modern society is horrible in all sorts of ways leading to, among other things, rising rates of mental health issues. But I fail to see the connection between rising rates of depression and mental health issues and what's being discussed here.
I am not sure how this relates to OPs comment about "f*cked up" videos being posted. There is no connection between depression and becoming interested in posting gruesome videos.
Diagnosis of depression going up (as shown in the first link) don't necessarily mean incidents of depression are going up. It could be that more people are trying to treat it than before.
That view goes back much farther than apocalyptic movies. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes wrote:
>the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes, like many philosophers, did not have much faith in human nature.
"The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it?" - Jeremiah
"Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." - Moses, about man before the flood.
"This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil." - the Gospel of John
Humanity has suffered for millions of years. Just recently we have been able to live peacefully, but most of the population does not live in Japan or the Netherlands. And even then just 70 years ago these places went through a World War.
We have a long way to go until everyone on the planet can grow up in conditions where you turn out 'default good/well-meaning towards others'.
I don't believe that humanity has suffered for millions of years. From what I've read, life before agriculture was decent. The trouble really seemed to begin with agriculture, land, and people ownership.
Population explosion also began with agriculture, since more offspring meant more people to work your lands. Hunter-gatherers breastfed longer (so more years between ability to become pregnant again). Plus they were relatively mobile, so more having more children was not a practical goal.
Many of the diseases and other problems we have now are related to population increases in small areas (bad sanitation, etc.).
Then you've read some terribly misleading, romanticized false version of history. Hunter-gatherer lives should not be romanticized as being desirable. They were (and are, in the few places they still exist) incredibly hard, dangerous and miserable existences.
Think of it as the most extreme form of poverty. No clean water, no shoes, malnutrition, limited protection against the weather. Every day going about basic tasks carries the risk for death, disease and disablement.
There is a reason that human population didn't rapidly increase until relatively recently in our collective hundred-thousand-year history. It's because most humans died before reaching reproductive age. Even in the few pockets of the globe with conditions favorable to survival, periodic events (weather, disease, rival groups, over-hunting, etc) wiped out entire tribes in terrible ways.
>From what I've read, life before agriculture was decent.
I've read arguments in both directions and I'm extremely suspicious that they are almost all basically politically-driven. It goes like this:
If hunter-gatherers are predisposed to more or less gender or economic equality, or certain social structures, then that should perhaps inform how we construct our own modern societies.
In order to escape the clear appeal to nature fallacy, it then becomes necessary to argue that not only were prehistoric societies constructed in a certain way, but they were also extremely well-off. Therefore we clearly must "reject modernity, retvrn to monke", and embrace True Human Nature embodied by some cultural tradition or ideology.
The exact inverse would obviously imply that we must embrace a certain idea of technological or social progress in order to escape the "natural state of humanity" as fast as we can.
However, was the human hunter-gatherer experience was ever all that stable or predictable such that we can obviously draw out either of those major conclusions? I think a decent null hypothesis might be that all the extremes of human experience and social structure had to have occurred to some degree and that the overall average and distribution would fluctuate quite a bit over time according to weather, migration patterns, and accidents of cultural evolution that humanity at any level had basically no control over.
I find it really hard to believe that we can possibly have enough evidence in any relevant discipline to rule this out.
> The Younger Dryas (c. 12,900 to 11,700 years BP[2]) was a return to glacial conditions which temporarily reversed the gradual climatic warming after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, c. 27,000 to 20,000 years BP). The Younger Dryas was the last stage of the Pleistocene epoch (c. 2,580,000 to 11,700 years BP) and it preceded the current, warmer Holocene epoch. The Younger Dryas was the most severe and long lasting of several interruptions to the warming of the Earth's climate...
Anatomically modern humans have only been around for ~300,000 years. Behaviorally modern humans, more like 150,000 years (or as recently as 60,000 years, depends who you ask). We are really a very young specie.
What bothers me is that many basic ethical principles fall by the wayside when the topic shifts to our own children. The reason for that is obvious: we are the descendants of organisms that valued reproduction. It's nonetheless an interesting discussion to have.
Is it ethical to create a sentient AI that might suffer? -> we already make similar decisions millions of times per day
Don't treat humans as means to an end, instead treat them as ends -> we create other humans to satisfy our current needs in a world characterized by struggle
And of course as you have pointed out, some groups consider that it's better by default for a child to exist in adverse starting conditions (whilst also negatively impacting other people) than to not exist
The people who decide bringing new life into this world is unethical will quickly be replaced those who think it _is_ ethical. I understand your reasoning, but "don't have kids" can never be the answer.
It might never become popular but every individual aware of the argument can then choose to reproduce or not (assuming they aren't barred from it for other reasons). In other words, we can't really hide behind the survival of the species as a whole when we consider our own actions and their ramifications.
We know the great mass of humans will carry on as before and there's little we can do to change that, but we are also aware that we have this responsibility that we can act on in our own life. Every person in the position to reproduce has a choice laid out before them. For the majority of us, it's the single most impactful ethical decision we will ever make.
From what perspective are you using the word "quickly" here? From human scales, quickly isn't true as China has been limiting to 1 kid for how long? From cosmological scales, humans barely even existed.
> What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up.
I already knew that. I even know the percentage roughly. According to the Pareto principle, 80% of people are not totally fucked up, but the 20% that are cause 80% of the problems.
No, you don't. This "principle" is not a law of physics, it's just a rule of thumb that may or may not be wildly off the mark for an arbitrary distribution. Its common usage is like statistics horoscope.
Having worked as a data scientist at multiple companies (From FANG to startup), the first thing I look at when I get my hands on data is the existence of the Pareto principle.
I still haven’t found one company where this principle didn’t show up.
What does this prove? If you have lots of data and dimensions, I bet you could just as likely find distributions that are roughly 50/50, 60/40, 90/10, 100/0 if you looked for them.
There's a nested Pareto in that 20% of that 20% causes 80% of the 80%. Considering that psychopathy (or whatever the updated term is) runs at a bit more of a percent of the population...
It used to be more obvious. The internet used to have popular gore sites and all sorts of horrible content that would find its way online and even go viral in a number of cases. I think law enforcement, automated detection, anti spam measures, linking accounts to humans, and the centralization of content around just a few sites that had strict rules made it seem like this content barely existed and that people behaved sociably on the internet. I think people lost sight of the rough edges.
TikTok is much harder to censor in automated ways, clearly. People also find ways around the censors. So all that awful stuff may have found a way back onto the internet.
You should have seen what terms most people searched for when they used a searched engine back in the day. I doubt things changed much since then. It's all of the worst things you can imagine and probably even worse than you think.
What's truly tragic is that these "fucked up people" will always be the loudest voice in any conversation (be it fucked up by genetics, upbringing, hormones, drugs or ideology).
Some people are depraved and simply lack a moral compass. What's scary to think is these are, statistically, people you pass on your way to work. They exist in poor and rich countries, among the pious and among the irreverent and in between.
It's the same kind of people who adopt[1] in order to get government subsidies but treat their charges worse than cattle --at least cattle get to graze nd do cattle things.
[1] I hope it's not necessary to state that this is a small minority of adoptive/foster parents, but they exist, unfortunately.
> What's most disturbing is the realization that a measurable percentage of humans are just f*cked up.
yeah I think that's the theme of David Lynch movies
> It also suggests that the apocalyptic movies may not be so far off when they suggest that humanity will revert to open barbarism if we're faced with a catastrophy large enough.
I think that's disproven - I saw a study where they looked at peoples' behaviour during the WWII London bombings and it was mostly characterized by Mutual Aid
> and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface.
Unless a person intentionally hides from the world, it is hard to not be aware of this. Human trafficking, cartels, pollution, there is a myriad of ways in which humans are just not "great people". Why act disillusioned by it?
>This is a serious thing, and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface.
"Build it yourself" internet bubbles are giving people hilariously wrong impressions of society, and humanity.
These same bubbles led to many millions of people shocked and flabbergasted when Donald Trump won in 2016. There will probably be just as many flabbergasted people when Democrats get thrown out of the House in three weeks. Internet "safe spaces" and censorship of differing opinions give people that impression that society is changing, or has changed. It hasn't.
Anything is possible, but the polls and prediction markets are telling a pretty grim story. Democrats may still hold the Senate, but it’s little better than a coin flip.
The fact that people are downvoting this obvious proclamation is further proof of my original claim. People are in bubbles, unaware of reality. No one should be shocked that Democrats are about to lose the Congress, and yet here we are.
Considering how many reports there are of Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok, and other sites where content moderators are suffering from having to perform their jobs, it suggests that there's a great deal of really terrible stuff going on - and worse, that the people involved are filming and attempting to share it.
This is a serious thing, and it paints humanity as being far darker than it would seem from the surface. It also suggests that the apocalyptic movies may not be so far off when they suggest that humanity will revert to open barbarism if we're faced with a catastrophy large enough.