I have realized when browsing some twitter culture war exchanges that people almost never respond to the opposing party's arguments. They imagine a set of arguments that uses some of the same words and then argue with that. This type of exchange never results in agreement -- or even the exchange of information! It's unhinged from any communicative act. It's merely inflammatory.
I do think this is extremely problematic in the long run.
My main concern in online discussions is that you're effectively arguing against a hydra. Even if you successfully convince a group of people about the validity of a specific point, there will always be someone else who will show up to continue arguing (often, as you say, with a completely different argument). And if someone successfully convinces me that my argument was wrong, there is no way for me to declare the point settled - someone else will show up and keep the discussion going.
It's turtles all the way down, where each turtle is yelling at the one on top.
It's my personal belief that the endless arguing as you describe is the main point of Twitter for a lot of people; they're not there to settle an argument or to have their mind changed, they're there for the heated discussions.
And I kinda get it, I was there for it as well and to this day will make shitposts on the internet with no intent to actually engage with any replies <_<
There's no function similar to "likes", "upvotes", or "reddit gold" that incentivizes good faith communication either. The features are too ambiguous. One community on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ invented their own "delta" awards, where you submit a stance, people try to convince you otherwise, and if they do, they're awarded a "delta".
It's a small community, but it's an interesting experiment at what online communication could be.
> It's my personal belief that the endless arguing as you describe is the main point of Twitter for a lot of people; they're not there to settle an argument or to have their mind changed, they're there for the heated discussions.
'twas ever thus - some people just like arguing. Give them an amplifier and they'll never stop. Usenet was the same, back in the day, so its nothing new.
I would recognize that as just another form of bad faith communication. If you’re not in a debate to listen, learn and see things from another perspective you are just in it for emotional reasons (“I want to be right”,”Look how cool I am”,”My way or the highway”, etc)
It goes far beyond twitter culture. Even in daily conversation there are people who only open out port and close in port. One signal is that whenever you bring up a perspective (either in support/disagreement) this person gonna continue his speech and make the conversation expereince like attending a lecture.
Addressing your opponent position lets them pick what the topic is. They are picking a topic their position is strong at. Therefore addressing your opponent position in limited-attention setting (aka publicly) is simply a losing move.
For your own sanity, yeah I think so; online 'debates' only drain energy and attention if the other party is not acting in good faith.
That said, if you are playing, the winning move is not to play their games. Don't engage with their attempted straw man arguments, or end up in endless discussions about semantics. Some of the best debates I've seen / read were people not playing games and not reacting to bad faith arguments / tactics, but instead cleverly pointing out something else.
My online posting life got a lot less stressful once I realized that the world will be exactly the same if I neglect to rebut some twitter user's bad/uninformed point of view.
Maybe you have a ton more social clout than I do, though :P
Same here, although I just redefine winning to learning something new, seeing a different perspective or refining my own position. It's all about exchanging information.
I am not familiar with public debate. Before two persons start a public debate, is it a common assumption that you are going to hold your ground till the end, whatever the information provided by the opponent?
There is no flow of information and I could not see this form of acts as "communication" - it seems to be more like a kind of art/show/performance.
The goal of a public debate is to influence the perception of the many passive listeners, not the few other participants of the debate; There is extensive flow of information/communication, but it's simply not aimed towards the other participants of the debate.
So a key part of such debates becomes influencing or provoking others to talk about things that advance your cause and avoiding discussion of things that hurt it. E.g. if someone says "you eat babies" and you respond with extensive evidence that you don't, then that public debate becomes a debate about you being a baby-eater and not whatever you wanted to promote.
That's just it, neither side goes to Twitter for a good faith argument, they're there to vent and lash out, but they've already dismissed the other party.
I mean not always, but I do wonder if the posts that LOOK like they're in good faith are also misleading as such.
Best thing to do is to not spend the energy. Don't engage with anyone if they don't have an open mind or are acting in bad faith. If it's more neutral, you can always ask "What will it take you to change your mind?"; the answer of that will determine if it's worth spending energy on. And the answer to that could be done in bad faith as well - for example, if the other says "I will change my mind if I see a scientific paper disproving me", but then proceeds to not actually read any scientific paper sent to them, they were acting in bad faith all along.
Another point about social media - it’s structurally easier to say things (done with a single ‘re-tweet’ click to thousands of people) but increasingly difficult to listen (you still have only one thing you can focus), and even harder to carry on a two-way conversation because of this disparity. Even if everyone is well intended, it would be difficult if everyone is talking at the same time now mix in bad-faith actors and the situation becomes dire.
The purpose of such exchanges is not to communicate information to the other participant. It is to signal allegiance to one’s own side. This dynamic tends to drive people who already disagree further apart, and those who already agree, closer.
Hmm. I no longer log into Twitter, but I do browse it without being logged in[0]. At least with regard to Brexit (about which it seems the argument is still raging), pro and anti do seem to engage with each other, the problem is they reject each other’s evidence.
[0] The annoying popups you get when you scroll too far without being logged in, do at least prevent me from doom-scrolling
re: Brexit, the "argument" has been poisoned by high level bad actors who pay money to have people and bots go on Twitter to defend their point, who pay for advertising / propaganda campaigns, etc. That goes far beyond some bad faith actors on twitter.
This extends to a lot of politics these days. There are well-financed parties out there whose goal is to destabilize, mainly targeting the US and Europe but I'm sure it happens everywhere. These are the ones behind Trump getting elected, Brexit proceeding even though only 28% of eligible voters voted in favor of it, the referendum being bad for only having two options, and the referendum only being advisory, and countries like Hungary and Poland shifting hard to authoritarian right, breaking with the separation of state and justice.
These forces have the destabilization of post-ww2 unions in mind on the one hand, and people focusing on each other internally instead of internationally on the other. Think things like JK Rowling's trolling, Trump coming out with something that all of twitter and the media pounce on, Reddit brigades.
>The annoying popups you get when you scroll too far without being logged in, do at least prevent me from doom-scrolling
I feel the same way! When they come up, my reaction is "nice"+cmd-w. Thanks, twitter!
To your response: I mean, there are some curious people on twitter. Curious people don't engage in the problematic dynamics outlied in the article, so some exchange of information happens there. That's clearly not representative of the bigger picture though, simply because the most people can't afford curiosity, courtesy of their cognitive functions (if you subscribe to Jungs model) and/or their position in maslows pyramid.
I have to admit I occasionally have crackpot physics ideas floating around in my head and I actually have seen that Dr Hossenfelder has this service and thought of contacting her. But my tech job took too much time to even clarify my thoughts. (I had probably 5 undergrad physics/astronomy courses.) How many of us have these thoughts I wonder? It's a fun way to pass the time. Recently I thought that rather than thinking of these ideas as physics I should look at them as science fiction and write an amusing story.
Same here. The crackpot side of me is trying to create intelligent tools to augment my own intelligence, so that I can get smart/fast/wise enough to understand / predict / control enough biology so I don't die of something boring before having a good long time to figure out how to get to a Neutron star or something. Beginning to realize that biology is more complicated than physics (the models, not the scope).
I worked as a principal engineer in an AI company until a year ago and I was impressed at how hard it is to get models robustly trained. They are fragile in real world contexts (in the field) and training is full of pitfalls. I have heard so much marketing enthusiasm but the real world situation is different. Some fundamental advances are not even in sight yet. We don't know what we are missing. My view is we don't know yet whether the singularity is possible and have no idea when it could arrive.
>>My view is we don't know yet whether the singularity is possible and have no idea when it could arrive.
The mere fact that evolution happened to stumble upon generalized strong intelligence is evidence to me that strong AI is possible.
We could currently be at the phase of trying to imitate birds to produce human flight. Eventually one person will figure it out when all the pieces are there. When? I don't know.
But I'm sure that it is possible to create machines with strong AI. We are living proof of it, it doesn't matter that we are made of molecular machines, we are still machines.
> The mere fact that evolution happened to stumble upon generalized strong intelligence is evidence to me that strong AI is possible.
That took about a billion years. If you're saying that we will achieve AGI in no more than a billion years of trying, I would generally agree.
But let's be optimists. Let's suppose that artificial intelligences can evolve on the order of a 1,000,000 times faster than biological intelligence; i.e. about 1 generation per hour.
That means we'd expect AGI in about 1000 years. Okay, lets up the scale : ten million times faster? One generation every 6 minutes? (Even at Google compute scale I doubt they can retrain GPT in less than 6 minutes). That would mean we still have about 100 years.
Also, evolution had quite a bit of parallelism going for it - basically the entire planet was a laboratory for evolving biological intelligence. I appreciate the scale of modern internet companies, but they don't consume the same amount of energy as combined photosynthesis of the entire planet. Evolution used a LOT of energy to get where it is.
Point of order, evolution took a lot more than a billion years to arrive at generalised intelligence if you start it from first principals (ie abiogenesis), which seems like the most apt comparison to us starting from some sand and teaching it to count, then somehow inventing AGI.
Unicellular life emerged about 4 billion years ago.
FWIW, it then took about 2 billion years to come up with sexual reproduction, and then another half billion years to invent multicellular life, and then about 1.5 billion years to discover us.
If I were you I wouldn't apply right away to a 4 year college. Do community college in your chosen field and then transfer.
In California if can do 2 years in a community college you are guaranteed a spot in a school in the UC system. Not UC Berkeley, but still some place great. I think to qualify for this transfer you need to have a 'C' or 'B' average.
If you stay on the pity pot you won't get anywhere.
Also, in California, community college is very cheap.
I was a crappy student in HS and the only good thing about me was my SAT scores. They got me into a good school. I ended up as a highly ranked engineer at Microsoft. My heart sank when people started not using the SAT. I hope this becomes a trend.
I have also read that it is really really hard to show that tutoring pays off for the SAT. I think the SAT is the fairest part of the admissions package.
I looked at the "mildly pornographic app" you wrote and my reaction was, I would not choose to hire you. Basically I don't want to be exposed to people's sexual fantasies as a part of my job. It's obnoxious and way, way into the territory of TMI. Do what you like and keep it private. The fact you thought it was appropriate to share this with a potential employer reviewing your resume is a red flag. Your sense of what is appropriate to share in the workplace is clearly off.
This is quite different than merely listing an employer such as pornhub on your resume.
I think there is a structural problem here that we are avoiding. The reason some higher ups don't see the merit of particular individual developers is that their pay does not reflect their contribution. Pay is the simple metric that should reflect worth, but we don't use 10x or 100x pay scales. We are failing to pay stars and superstars in accordance with the value they contribute to company. profits.
This is something I fail to understand. no-one blinks an eye when proposing a high performing CEO he compensated appropriately but propose the same for an engineer and everyone looks at you funny unless you give them a VP title and saddle them with a bunch of non-technical responsibilities in the process. If an engineer is the crucial individual in creating and delivering a product that the companies profits are derived from they should also receive appropriate performance based compensation in line with senior management, perhaps even more as senior management is definitely more fungible (namely C level roles like CFO, etc).
The timing of this is so rich in irony I can't help but wonder if there is an element of internal sabotage. How many FB employees hate FB right now? The latest expose of FB is both effective and truly awful. I can't imagine feeling good about a FB job. And it's gotten worse! Now they look like they can't even keep their websites up.
Perhaps we'll find out. As fun as internal sabotage would be, schadenfreude-wise, i think it much more likely this will turn out to be a time when Hanlon's Razor applies
I do think this is extremely problematic in the long run.