I’m pretty skeptical that it’s possible to be immune to algorithmic content curation. It seems more than a little bit like the people who say “hey, mainstream media is all biased, but that’s not a problem for me because I’ve found the sources that are actually true”. How do you choose which content to watch and how does that process exclude algorithmic curation?
I don’t think it’s a matter of choosing content that is served up by algorithm but by finding the content that the algorithm omits. I find I then have to listen for what are truth statements, for verifiable truth statements, and sift out the emotional language. In fact, the more emotional the tone, the more intention I attribute to the engineering of it being shown to me. This has resulted in me looking at and reading what I think is garbage sometimes, but I typically find some nugget of truth in it that helps me reason about why someone would think that way. Kind of erases the left versus right thing in politics.
Why do you think content that is excluded from the algorithm is more legitimate?
How do you know it was excluded?
What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?
> What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?
I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Maybe this is true for the US, but in other places of the world, societies aren't yet as polarised (although, sadly, it looks as though we're copying the American model more and more).
Maybe you should make it more precise what you mean by left and right, otherwise it's always easy to call something "right-wing" just because it's more to the right than whichever positions you espouse.
(For the record, I always considered myself to be rather center-left, and I still hold many positions that are broadly left-wing, but recent events have made me realise that there's also a huge part of leftism with which I fundamentally disagree, so I'm not sure if I want to call myself that any more.)
It's the social media era equivalent to "advertising doesn't work on me, I can see right through these stupid commercials."
When I used to be on reddit there was this idea that algorithmic content curation didn't apply to us because of the upvote system. There often seems to be a similar implication (by way of omission) when these discussions come up on HN. I'm not familiar with the workings of the HN feed, I only migrated here last summer, but the reddit feed is absolutely subject to gaming and algorithmic shenanigans.
The comparison would be thinking our government is completely free from corruption and undue influence because we all have the right to vote.
I've read many books by activists, and by serious historians. After a while, you notice that the style of writing is different. The activist writers use noticeably more emotional language, draw sweeping conclusions based on flimsy evidence, have fewer cites, and no counterexamples are ever mentioned.
For a couple activist products, Showtime recently ran a miniseries documentary on Reagan, and HBO one on Kennedy. The 6 hour Reagan documentary was about everything that was wrong about Reagan (it even criticized Reagan for recovering rapidly from the assassination attempt), and Reagan did nothing right. The Kennedy documentary was the other way, Kennedy was a god among men and never put a foot wrong.
Do you think that is because the producers had some kind of agenda, or were they pandering to modern sentiments on those figures, or were they illustrating their own biases, or something else?
One thing I try to do is increase the amount of content I view because I explicitly requested it instead of what was being suggested to me. "Pull" instead of "Push". I don't ever log into youtube. I also have their related/recommended videos disabled, and I never see their homepage/trending stuff. They'll still put whatever random stuff they want you see in search results (usually pretty far down at least) and ultimately an algorithm determines what kinds of videos are included in any set of search results, but I do think it helps both to avoid being fed most of what they're pushing on people and (to some extent) limit the amount of time spent just mindlessly viewing youtube.
Same with streaming services, I'll skip over whatever their major ads are pushing at me (for example, the large banners at the top of the screen when you sign in, the "featured" category, etc.) and I won't be satisfied with whatever they decide to show you (repeatedly) in whatever random categories the algorithm presents to me that day. I use the search function a lot there too, often just entering "random" strings of 3-4 characters and seeing what comes back as I keep scrolling down.
Like with youtube, you can tell that when they're pushing something hard enough they'll just insert that stuff into the results of any search you enter, but I'm often surprised to find a lot of things I want to see that the streaming service had never shown me before that way. I'm disappointed that HBO Max decided to abandon their simple A-Z listing of everything they had in order to encourage people to depend only on their algorithm.
The more I can eliminate or avoid things being pushed at me and decide for myself what content to consume the more variety I see, but at a certain level you're always left with whatever people are willing to show/sell you which is frustrating. Exploration and recommendations from actual humans are more fun anyway.
For news and other topics I want information on I try to look at stuff from multiple sources and perspectives to avoid the filter bubble problem and to get an idea of what people who'd disagree with me are thinking or understanding about a topic. I find that when I'm reading content from people/perspectives I strongly disagree with I automatically read what they're saying very critically and that practice carries over so that I can't help but do it even when I'm reading things from people/sources I personally trust generally. Terrible arguments, bad facts, and attempts to mislead are pretty common everywhere and this does make me a lot less confident in what I "know", but that's probably a good thing.
> I'm disappointed that HBO Max decided to abandon their simple A-Z listing of everything they had in order to encourage people to depend only on their algorithm.
I wish Netflix/Comcast/Prime had a ribbon called "randomly selected" that was like shuffle play on my stereo, and have it change daily.
I have people I like watching, and find other stuff I like through that persons own recommendations.
If you want my political take, I have searched for intelligence and consistency my entire life without realizing it up until the last few years. Ive been through several different sources, from corporate news to noam chomsky, conspiracy grifters to their critics; learning the truth about what happens in the political realm requires a level of diligence that seems to defy what can be presented to another. It would require so much time to understand all the relationships, motives, and the evidence for them, that it would be a several year endeavor. Given the fact that I have other things to do with my life, I have to start with what values I can follow and the heuristics that can be applied out of them; so I have decided on the nonagression principle, arguementative ethics, anarchocapitalism and their related concepts. I have chosen these because I have found them to be logically and morally consistent, and when idle I occupy my brain by trying to poke holes in these ideas, unsuccessfully to date. Values in hand, and having enough life experience to see that values seperate pro-social and anti-social behavior, I have committed myself to placing those values above whatever day-to-day contrivances I have; however much easier it would be for me to violate those values is not my concern, I follow those values because I value them more than any personal problem I have.
Those values now firmly at the center of my thinking, I can apply the heuristics that can be derived from them, and quickly dismiss propaganda that calls me to any kind of political action. I dont vote, I dont intend to start, and if I am listening to anyone saying anything about politics, even someone I like, I am left only to try to poke holes in whatever they say. This leads to me being the most critical of people I like, which is probably a reasonable way to approach these topics.
