Republicans have learned to weaponize attention far better than Democrats. Negative attention is still attention, and where Democrats shrink from "gaffes" or criticism, Republicans just recognize that public criticism is still a form of attention. Even among each other. Whoever gets the most eyeballs, top stories, and headlines for longest wins this game.
Vicious, vindictive, petty, nonsensical, random, and trolling tactics are all strategically useful in this media landscape.
Republicans have the benefit of not having guilt around saying things that are patently not true while the Democrats are still trying to act within norms.
Democrats literally just lost an election because of their tremendous ability to lie to themselves: Biden isn't incapacitated; selecting candidates based on race/gender doesn't compromise on quality; immigration has no drawbacks; etc.
I take the sharp as a tack comeback, that is fair.
Regarding selecting based on gender compromising or not compromising candidate quality is a vastly more compex question. It is sad that a lot of people have a simple answer to themselves. That immigration has no drawbacks I have not heard anywhere, seems like a position you assign to democrats, not one they hold.
> Regarding selecting based on gender compromising or not compromising candidate quality is a vastly more compex question
Except Kamala Harris put the correct answer to that question into stark relief. Everyone knew from 2019 that she was a terrible campaigner and manager. But Biden picked her as VP and then Democrats picked her as the nominee because they were able to lie to themselves that she was an accomplished individual rather than someone who had moved up within California uniparty politics because of her race and gender. Selecting people considering race and gender in an effort to “make history” or correct past wrongs is a deeply misguided practice. But I didn’t expect it to blow up in people’s faces quite so quickly and spectacularly.
I will add that the media infrastructure around the Republicans have also managed to convince most of their viewers that "up is down" in a way that I would not have believed possible (but should have from reading many books about the Third Reich etc.)
You cannot reason someone out of a position they haven't reasoned themselves into.
Politicians lie, constantly. All of them. Yes, even the ones you like. Saying Republicans lie and Democrats don't is practically self-propagandizing, convincing oneself of something they'd prefer to be true.
ALL politicians are equal-opportunity liars: if there's an opportunity, they will lie. Sometimes for power, sometimes for money, sometimes because they owe a favor. It's a big club, and we aren't in it.
> Politicians lie, constantly. All of them. Yes, even the ones you like. Saying Republicans lie and Democrats don't is practically self-propagandizing, convincing oneself of something they'd prefer to be true.
> ALL politicians are equal-opportunity liars: if there's an opportunity, they will lie. Sometimes for power, sometimes for money, sometimes because they owe a favor. It's a big club, and we aren't in it.
If you genuinely believe this, how do you determine which way to vote?
It's not like you can call a particular set of politicians (country or party) pathological liars and then take seriously election promises from any member of that set.
I vote for those who lie to me the most convincingly about having my family's best interest at heart, and who claim to have goals for the country that align with my values.
Well, it's coherent I guess. But you are just selecting for being convincing. Why not try to decide what you think each candidate will actually do, rather than caring about what they say, when you describe their lack of honesty in terms I would reserve for just the worst of them?
(Considering where I grew up, "the worst of them" would mainly be Boris Johnson: even if I don't like many of the other better-known UK politicians, they at least seem to say things that reflect their actual value systems, whereas Johnson… https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-qa-what-di...).
It's a response to the fact that democrats can create widespread misperceptions through their control of traditional media. For example, in 2018, 66% of Democrats believed that "Russia tampered with vote tallies to get Donald Trump elected President." https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/20383-russias-imp.... Hillary Clinton never went out and said quite that. But the barrage of coverage from all angles in the media created the same impression as if she had said that.
In another example: how many people know that, after the 2000 election, the Supreme Court found 7-2 that Al Gore's proposed recount strategy was unconstitutional? Nobody knows that Al Gore had employed a strategy of hand-counting ballots only in counties he had won to find more countable votes that would swing disproportionately in his favor.[1] The media completely blacked that out, and everyone now only remembers the 5-4 part of the decision addressing how to fix that constitutional violation. There's more people under the misimpression that Kathleen Harris or Jeb fixed the election in Bush's favor than understand the sneaky maneuvering by Gore that precipitated the whole mess.
[1] E.g. if Gore won a county 2:1, then statistically, every vote rejected by the machine that could be hand counted would be twice as likely to be a Gore vote than a Bush vote. Gore found a loophole in Florida election law that allowed him to use that principle to find more votes in his favor by seeking hand recounts only in two large counties he had won.
Another example of whataboutism, this time about a guy who ran for presidency many many years ago. He's the one who gave attention to this now obvious unconvenient truth. Back then they criticized the energy use of his house, which still compares very pale against the consequences of this, still swept under the carpet today, inconvenient truth.
MAGA didn't happen in a vacuum. Two republican presidents have been elected in the 21st century, and after both of their first elections, the media fostered widespread misperception of the legitimacy of their wins through selective reporting of the truth. For people coming into the leadership of the GOP now, folks in their 40s and 50s like Vance and Johnson, remember the 2000 election very well, but not the Walter Cronkite era when the media was more even-handed. That inevitably shapes their own approach to communication.
“Fragile” trust? That trust has been beaten out of us at every turn for an entire generation. There is nothing fragile about American exceptionalism or the dream of achievement; we’ve just been shown repeatedly that we are becoming the third-world bully regime in the eyes of the world and, increasingly, in our own.
Every bad thing we’ve been taught to believe about China or Russia, it turns out we do too and often worse. So what loyalty should we have? What has democracy and capitalism done for us but bankrupt our seniors with medical debt and addict our children to iPads and amphetamines?
I’d love to be able to trust my government and the American ideal again, but don’t tell me I’m weak for second-guessing the whole con game this century is turning into.
”What has democracy and capitalism done for us...”
Radicaly increased wealth. I guess you have access to drinking water, food, place to sleep and be warm at cold sessions. It wasn't a standard few decades ago and still it is not fot most in the world.
"I’d love to be able to trust my governmen..."
Do you really believe that government solve your problems?
Over the last 40 years, China’s version of socialism with state-controlled markets have lifted more people out of poverty than ours. Democracy and capitalism have not benefited me in my lifetime. My taxes go to fund foreign wars and lining the pockets of American oligarchs.
“Radically increased wealth”, for who? Government has never solved my problems, only created more. My point is that I would have been doing better under China’s system than ours.
> My point is that I would have been doing better under China’s system than ours.
I’m not sure how you can say this with a straight face. China hit rock bottom after the cultural revolution and they had a lot of “the only place left to go is up!” going on. This is like someone saying their salary increased 5X from $10k to $50k and calling that better than someone’s salary only going up by a third from $200k to $300k. Yes, the improvements have been great, and while your life would have improved more under Chinese rule (velocity), do you really think your position would be better off? (And imagine only making $50k or $100k/year and houses still start at a million bucks!)
If you don’t like government meddling, China probably isn’t the place for you. Yes, they might not pay attention that you aren’t following some rule for awhile, but the rule exists and they will eventually hit you with non-compliance.
This is basic "mind palace" theory, no? Human memory is linked to navigation; the more you associate memories with navigable places, the stronger your memories will remain.
I have distinct memories as a kid of mapping things into abstract 3d spaces. The number line in my head is a weird 3D thing I still visually navigate whenever I think about numbers.
what's weird is that even while I still use my representations formed as a kid, I don't seem to make new ones when I learn new info, which makes remembering things much harder.
> I have distinct memories as a kid of mapping things into abstract 3d spaces. The number line in my head is a weird 3D thing I still visually navigate whenever I think about numbers.
> the more you associate memories with navigable places, the stronger your memories will remain.
Some of us have a location synaesthesia where thinking about particular topics often evokes a sense of being specific places, looking particular directions, each paired apparently randomly (but durably) with topics. Not sure if this is association (since it seems to form without any associating event with the location) or just signal "leakage" triggering the connection.
This is straight-up identity theft, and likely breaks any number of consumer protection laws. I don't necessarily mind AI being used to write articles that are otherwise factual, but stealing a reporter's name to write about places he's never been and things he's never done, restaurants he's never eaten at - strikes me as a dangerous gamble for companies playing in the slim margins of advertising-based journalism.
AI may write a great restaurant review or local experience story, but the lack of fact-checking is disturbing and I hope the corporations behind these tools can be held to account when they inevitably harm someone with egregious misinformation.
In general, if you harm everyone in an instinctively obvious but factually hard-to-demonstrate way, there aren't any meaningful penalties. The situations in which "we all suffer" are the ones where people get away with it, eh?
Personifying it this way -- finding someone who is clearly injured -- is the only way to make progress.
"A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a
statistic." -- Stalin
Thanks for replying. I wonder, although, in US America for example, it
requires "demonstrable harm" to bring lawsuits etc, there is an
enduring concept of "the fabric of society" [0] in many legal
traditions. (I think it is likely examined by J.S. Mill) and even
appears in US congressional commentary [1]. In a digital context there
is some mileage here [3].
Might we see a successful lawsuit on the merits that the "mere
existence" of some technologies is an affront. "Artificial
Intelligence" is after all "artifice"
artifice: a clever trick, guile, deception, cunning, a skillful or
artful contrivance
You realize that video slots, financial software, HR software, legal software, educational software and MANY more all have some amount of regulatory compliance, right? Do you think social media is special somehow and should just get a free pass when aspects of it have been shown to be potentially dangerous?
I do. Social media is how we communicate with each other - governments should tread extremely carefully.
It is not governments job to ensure that certain viewpoints are not expressed or that people stay ideologically influenced by the views of other people.
It’s not like 14 year olds were reading newspapers before, and this is not a legacy media cartel trying get more teenagers into watching the news. Not everything has to be a conspiracy.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, this is a pointed analysis of why crawl-based search is insufficient for an Internet of our current scale. There is no corporate-curated algorithm that is up to the task, especially when the primary purpose is to profit from advertising.
Google is remarkably effective at handling the scale. It doesn't seem up for handling the sheer army dedicated to misleading it. Especially now that they've been given tools for automating crap generation.
Ironically, Google itself was a key developer of that tech.
If there is any solution it would seem to involve removing the incentive to merely look at your page. That problem seems remarkably stubborn.
I think that they'd rather show you the right answers, if they can. Those sites will often have exactly the same ads, and they won't make you think about jumping ship to Bing or Kagi. And advertisers will pay more for sites that actually have good reputations.
Search engines are the picks-and-shovels of the Internet gold rush. They profit either way. They want to do it in a way that keeps the gravy train going.
I'm no starry-eyed capitalist. I'm sure that Google would sell their own grandmothers for a few ad clicks. But occasionally the cynical thing to do is actually the right thing.
>There is no corporate-curated algorithm that is up to the task, especially when the primary purpose is to profit from advertising.
I think this is the root cause of the problem. Google can easily put a big dent in this problem by allowing users to create their own importable/exportable filters and support the dissemination of something like "EasyList for search results." But that kills their golden goose of advertising influence.
It would indeed be crowd-sourced, but with a core set of maintainers. Wouldn't be all that different from EasyList or Steven Black's HOSTS file. They basically take in merge requests from the community and serve as an initial filter against garbage. [1]
And unlike Amazon reviews or YouTube comments, anyone can fork it if they think they can maintain it better.
[1] "The filter lists are currently maintained by four authors, Fanboy, MonztA, Khrin, Yuki2718 and PiQuark6046, who are ably assisted by an ample forum community." https://easylist.to/
People like Mr. Beast have managed to discover psychological attention hacks that are not too dissimilar from sex or fear-based content (porn or a lot of political ads), but more insidious because it’s much more tame and “fun” on the surface.
And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to provide a social fix here. Government will need to take note, label, and activate against this at some level. The TikTok ban means we’ve noticed this can be dangerous at least when rival nation-states are involved, but the call is coming from inside the house.
YouTube Shorts is really dark, there's stuff that makes David Foster Wallace's 1996 vision of people hyperglued to a TV look prescient instead of allegorical.
There are many, many, videos that are literally the adult version of baby videos -- ex. Squeezing rainbow colored Play-Doh through a sieve, really bizarre just pure visual attention hacking.
Your comment reminds me that's the local optima for YouTube x creators and it's just sort of contracting the work of actually producing content out. It doesn't care what it is. Just hours consumed.
The abuse of FOIA for police bodycam content published with light commentary... Zoom court sessions enabled turning judges into stars on a show they have no part of it...
I think schools need to start teaching "How to Train Your Algorithm" classes to kids, early and often - with a focus on critical thinking and how advertising companies manipulate them.
Couple that with regulations that require the companies to give greater control to the user over video feed customisation and I think it's possible to reign in the arms race for attention.
I'd say I get the adult baby videos 1 in 15 "swipes" and the bodycam / court stuff are for long form, and is definitely because I watch true crime - i.e. I found courtroom videos of long trials fascinating because I wanted to be a lawyer growing up
It's important to note it's not about individual feeds, but the basins that algorithmic content settles in given the data they have.
As things evolve, they optimize for brutally efficient production. "true crime" starts as "NPR award-winning podcast phenomena" and very quickly come to mean a swath of "DUI arrest" videos.
That's because the initial click, averaged across all of us, is *hyper*optimized for a thumbnail with an attractive scantily clad young female saying COPS DAUGHTER THROWS TANNTRUM AFTER BLOWING 0.24! It's not about individuals, or individuals feeds, it's about these niches get hyperdominated by nonsense because that's what best practice is. c.f. document's comments re: thumbnails vs. mine.
Note also, for instance, the curious absence of any programmer influencers making anywhere near the views of pretty much any other topic on YouTube. t3.gg is the top in software engineering videos by a mile, and they pull in 1/10th of what a bodycam video does.
not exact match, if i see the bac one again i'll share it.
but this is somewhat typical of the drama, only missing element is a generic slop voiceover that interjects every 2 minutes with two sentences:
1. vague statement about what's happened so far that could apply to any video.
2. "...but they weren't prepared for what happened next!" (nothing crazy ever happens) (except on the 'cop gets arrested for DUI' ones where they think they're gonna get a favor like its 1994 still)
These "adult baby videos" are the default content on TikTok.
My paranoid take is that it is a type of hypnotism or mind control yet to be deciphered.
In reality, it is just a cheap way of generating (remixing/stealing) content with TTS voice overs and algorithmic selections of video clips. I would bet there is software tailored for it, but I am not interested enough to find out.
This is true, but it's a constant fight with the recommendation system, requiring a fairly strict approach to flagging "not interested" and "do not show this channel again" etc - as soon as you watch one junk-food video in a lazy day, prepare for another round of moderating tangentially related garbage.
The flavor of the cotent is a bit different, but all media is like that. Look at a horror film, or romance novel. It's very clear what human urges/interests are being targetted.
Part of his strategy is copying TV. He famously made a Squid Game episode.
Humans can also spend an entire lifetime (or more, across multiple generations) being absolutely, inexorably and violently certain they are correct about something and still be 100% wrong.
I am not disagreeing that either people or LMMs are not extremely helpful in many or most instances. But if the best we can do with this technology is to make human-comparable mistakes WAY faster and more efficiently, I think as a species we’re in for a lot more bad times before we get to graduate to the good times.
We do, but it’s messy and usually involves a few years of courtship, followed by one to three decades of raising & educating the resulting human to anything resembling a useful model for comparison.
No, the claim is much stronger than that: that the zygote itself encodes necessary information that isn’t captured in DNA. Put another way, long after humans are extinct, the claim is that if aliens could download our DNA source code somehow, they still wouldn’t be able to build humans without replicating the zygote’s internal structures exactly. We’d come out as super deformed or something.
Perhaps the first generation would be deformed but second-gen (if they hypothetically get that far) should be much closer. You still need the mitochondrial DNA as well.
Well, first of all, they wouldn't be able to build a single functioning cell if all they had was DNA (and even if they had mitochondrial DNA too). Most organelles divide independently of the nucleus, and there is no reason to think that DNA encodes anything about their fundamental structure. Even if some changes in genes can effect some changes in the organelles, that doesn't mean that the genes specify every detail of the organelle.
Also, even if we accepted that DNA fully specifies how a cell can create an identical copy of the cell that contains it, that doesn't mean that it specifies how to create a cell from scratch. The "instructions" in DNA could very well depend critically on details of the current cell. For example, the DNA could specify se thing like "take 1% of the substance secreted in organelle A and mix it with 90% water and 9% the substance secreted by organelle B". This instruction is perfectly good for specifying a copy of the current cell, and perfectly useless if you don't have the original cell for which it is meant.
This sort of thing could very well apply at the level of the whole fetus. Details of the uterus and other parts of the mother organism may well be critical parts of the "program" described by the DNA. For example, it's easy to imagine that the early fetus follows instructions like "let this much fluid pass through the umbilical chord", or "grow horizontally until you find this much pH difference between the extremeties" or whatever other instructions that are only useful in the context of an existing functioning mother organism.
And even beyond the individual, you would have a big problem recreating the species to allow for a second generation to exist at all. In particular, even if you had a whole living healthy female mammal, you would have no information at all for how to create a male of the species, so no way to create sperm cells, so no way to perpetuate the species. So the DNA of a female mammal doesn't contain information for how to make more of the species. And if all you had was a male organism, you would lack the information probably encoded in the living female that I was discussing earlier.
As a side note, this problem would not exist for birds, where the female bird does have both male and female DNA.
Not only that, but you're not even given the compiler. If all you have is the DNA (even if you had the mitochondrial DNA too), you have source code for a language no one knows with no compiler.
Or, more accurately, it's like having binary machine code for an unknown ISA with no information about the CPU, and no example CPU.
Well based on compiler bootstrapping techniques, it seems the solution is simple: Start by hand-assembling the most basic RNA life, then run each step of evolution in sequence. All you need is the DNA (and know the living conditions) of every single organism between single-celled organisms and a modern human.
Vicious, vindictive, petty, nonsensical, random, and trolling tactics are all strategically useful in this media landscape.
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