Category: Social media

Public Interest Algorithms and the Jungle of Earth Two

Public Interest Algorithms: An idea whose time has come, and  will quickly be shelved by free-market ideology

Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has proposed a technical measure to defend against the trend of social media to divide us: Public Interest Algorithms.  See this in the Brookings Institution website: Wheeler on Public Interest Algorithms

Tom Wheeler is a very smart guy, so why has he poisoned his concept by branding it as a public interest initiative?  In an era when free-market ideologues hold sway over the intransigent core of Republicans in Congress, and Silicon Valley is jam-packed with libertarians, anything that smacks of public interest is derided as an instrument of the Nanny State.  If you can’t legislate restaurants to stop providing super-sized soft drinks to their customers (a clear public health hazard), how are you going to keep at bay the Sultans of Social Media who will fight tooth and nail against public interest algorithms tampering with their business models?

A current Senate hearing on Russian meddling with U.S. elections via social media finds Facebook and Twitter PR spinners making conciliatory noises while at the same time holding fast to their narrative of social media as the best outlets for the freest flow of information ever conceived of by the human race.  The problem with this narrative is the unbounded nature of the “flow.”  It’s not like a stream that gathers the contributions of multiple tributaries and flows in a direction (toward the truth or at least a wide consensus). It’s not even like a river that has overleapt its banks in a flood, since a flood, too, still has a recognizable shape and direction.  It is a deluge pounding down anywhere and everywhere, a Hurricane Harvey hovering over continents. The “public interest” is a drowning victim.

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The Other Addiction: Is Democracy Sunk?

Chemical Addiction: Unsolved although Obvious

Addiction to painkillers has been killing a lot of people. For years.  Just why it has been getting so much media attention recently may have to do with (1) criticality, analogous to the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining, has been reached; (2) liberal alarm over the surge in “Trump voters,” many of whom, rural and white, are now suffering from addictions on a par with that of urban blacks whose votes have long been taken (and are still taken) for granted by Democrats.   PBS recently ran a series on the subject. It appears that bright spotlights being trained on the opiate epidemic are giving rise to promising local and state programs to save addicts’ lives and then turn them around.  The former is easier than the latter; instances abound of addicts having their lives saved one day only to overdose the next (and the next and the next), and the burden that puts on emergency services has led to a debate of whether there should be quotas, as in Three Strikes and You’re Out (for eternity).

Noises are being made at the national administrative and legislative levels to address the countrywide epidemic, but there’s little real movement, despite candidate Trump’s promise to do something. That was to be expected, since he was unclear from the start as to what, and seems to have forgotten his pledge while chaos erupts on every issue that he touches.  In the legislature, there is much public hand-wringing but not much legislating. Even if laws are passed to mitigate the opioid epidemic, who in a government drifting toward self-destruction will carry them out?

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Guess Who’s Attacking J.K. Rowlings

J.K. Rowlings is now under Twitter siege by, guess who, Trump fans who were fans of hers, now angry ex-fans stirred to invective on account of Rowlings’s criticism of Their Royal Highness, Donald Trump.

Yes! Some of them are now burning her books! (Where have we heard of this kind of thing before?)

Rowlings War

(Note the Post has a paywall, and they will block you if you’re not a subscriber and have gone over your monthly limit.)

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Coping in the Data Ocean

Our Oceanic Data Environment and the Paradox of Choice

What is it like to be a bat? is the  title of a paper by Thomas Nagel in the Philosophical Review in October 1974 that is widely quoted and discussed among philosophers.  But you don’t have to be a philosopher to see that the question goes straight to the mystery of consciousness. Is the consciousness of a bat anything like ours? What about a wolverine, a gecko, a sea urchin?

How does an  animal’s environment shape its consciousness? You’d expect that the consciousness of a wandering albatross, who spends months at a time on the wing without ever touching land, has to be wildly different from that of a mole who spends most of its time underground in the space of half an acre.

For more on wandering albatross flight, see this will blow your mind

It’s all very well to imagine yourself a wandering albatross. It sounds like a glorious life, untethered by our bonds to mere stationary places and to people who do not soar thousands of miles at a stretch.

But, what is it like to be a fish?

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Crowd Wisdom, Fake News, Information Disparity, and Antarctic Ice Shelves. What’s the connection?

Are Crowds Looking Better These Days?

Facebook is reported to be using crowdsourcing to keep Fake News in check. See https://headleaks.com/2016/12/facebook-tries-crowdsourcing-fact-checkers-to-fight-fake-news/

Trust in numbers. That’s what democracy is all about, right? In a representative democracy, crowds pick their representatives by majority rule. (I’m talking about the principle, not a debacle like the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.) Wisdom flows from the crowd. . . all of us persuaded of crowd wisdom are prepared to hand over most decisions to the crowd. Thus the popularity of ballot initiatives, such as the ones to legalize marijuana in several states in the 2016 election—let the voters decide, directly. Real democracy. Obtains the wisest results. If two heads are better than one, a million heads are better than. . . yours.

Or are they? There are a couple of things that call that into question crowd wisdom when applied to our real, complex, modern world.

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Fake News Ain’t the Half of It

“Fake News” is getting a lot of heat these days from some of us who actually believe that truth is better than untruth—those of us who are being forcibly dragged into the “post-truth” era.

As if “post-truth” were something new. Actually, we’ve been drifting into the post-truth fog for quite some time now.  In Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife (2014) chronicles the many ways in which the digital revolution and its star attraction, the Internet, have been masking, warping, and turning upside-down our perceptions of the world and even each other.  A pedestrian example is how easily one can manipulate one’s Facebook persona into one loosely based on, and more attractive than, the original—more good-looking, more cool, more talented, more sociable, more with it.  As the joke goes, “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog,” and no one knows whether what you’re feeding them is bullshit.

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