Elon Musk as educator

[WG Plum]

Compared to what?

Can you name any time in history when the big ideas that were discussed in the general public weren't overwhelmingly shaped and manipulated by a tiny minority of media gatekeepers?

I would argue that right now, there is a greater access to a diversity of ideas than ever before.

Thats not to say there aren't significant flaws. For one thing, the inherent nature of the Twitter-X platform means that it appeals to the lowest common denominator. It embodies the very definition of "The dumbing down of society" because it requires that every complex idea expressed on the site must be condensed into a virtual post it note.

But algorithmic flaws and all, Twitter does exist in this form, and it's the dominant method of putting ideas out into the public arena, like it or not.

So the question is: do we want it to be run by people who arbitrarily censor content based on whom they agree with and whom they don't, or by people who are more inclusive and allow a greater diversity of opinion?

What's interesting to me is the fact that so many people are rooting for X to fail. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if that did happen, because it would end their virtual monopoly and hopefully a variety of other platforms will move in to fill the void.

As far as I'm concerned, the more ideas that are readily available to the public, the better - including ideas that are offensive, stupid, or even hateful. Let's get them out in the open where we can see what they are discuss them honestly and judge them on their merits, not on how they make us feel emotionally.

Somehow, I think you missed his point entirely.

 

[FRoss6788]

They’ve thrown out the books in every library in each of the high schools in the city where I teach. Connecticut’s largest.

Free access to information is circling the drain in our society.

I skimmed some of your post, but my takeaway os that you’ve bought into the idea that this new internet thing is something that it in reality is not.

It reads you. You don’t (really) read it.

Although I enjoy many aspects of the internet, this site in particular, I believe it to be a net negative on society as a whole.

A metastasizing cancer that is out of control. God help us with AI....

 

[Standalone]

I dropped Twitter when musk took over. I dropped FB and IG a week or two ago.

…Guess I’m back to being annoying and stirring stuff up on TB again.

Forums like this are still a bright spot on the internet. But the dynamic of the never ending scrolling social media universe is both hegemonic and toxic. Political discourse on all sides is shattered and toxic.

Musk’s vision of the future — of the now — is one where we don’t talk as a community or read as individuals any longer.

These times are something like Gutenberg in reverse. We feel like we are getting more information but we are not. We are largely swept into algorithmic eddies of our own co-creation with AI.

And good lord don’t get me started on AI

 

[Standalone]

Although I enjoy many aspects of the internet, this site in particular, I believe it to be a net negative on society as a whole.

A metastasizing cancer that is out of control. God help us with AI....

I want to work towards a vocabulary about informed choice around AI. A taxonomy of levels of AI.

Much like nutrition, I want to enable humans to make informed choices about AI consumption.

From “vegan” to “AI-lover’s Pizza” — if that makes sense.

I have personally committed to scrolling pst AI content and removing as much of it as I can, especially text/video/art.

Voice recognition and text to speech stuff is useful and if privacy and surveillance is curtailed, not as socially warping as other things.

But we don’t even really speak about it I. This way as a society. It’s like Orwell — if we don’t have a vocabulary for it, without the schema, we’ve no way to think or act on it.

 

[WG Plum]

I dropped Twitter when musk took over. I dropped FB and IG a week or two ago.

…Guess I’m back to being annoying and stirring stuff up on TB again.

I got rid of FB years ago, and Instagram earlier this year. Haven't missed either one bit. I never understood Twitter's appeal, so never had an account.

TB is just fine, and just enough.

 

[Lance Bunyon]

Technocrats are double plus ungood... because they have opportunity to abuse their massive power and most of them do.

Musk is probably the best of a very bad bunch. I don't trust any of them, Bezos Zuckerberg or Especially Gates.
Just because you have more power than a 1st world nation doesn't make it ok to wield it any way you want to.

 

[Standalone]

I got rid of FB years ago, and Instagram earlier this year. Haven't missed either one bit. I never understood Twitter's appeal, so never had an account.

TB is just fine, and just enough.

Much of my band’s promotion and the social networking of our local and regional jam band scene is tied to FB/IG. Or it feels like it at least.

But maybe I’m still in withdrawal and the musical and social real world things will clearly show their value and vitality

 

[WG Plum]

They're essentially unaccountable. What accountability there might have been has been weakened to negligibility (is that a word?) due to certain prevailing trends over the past forty years.

 

[WG Plum]

Much of my band’s promotion and the social networking of our local and regional jam band scene is tied to FB/IG. Or it feels like it at least.

But maybe I’m still in withdrawal and the musical and social real world things will clearly show their value and vitality

Well, I don't gig, sooooo.....

 

[hrodbert696]

Compared to what?

Can you name any time in history when the big ideas that were discussed in the general public weren't overwhelmingly shaped and manipulated by a tiny minority of media gatekeepers?

I would argue that right now, there is a greater access to a diversity of ideas than ever before.

Thats not to say there aren't significant flaws. For one thing, the inherent nature of the Twitter-X platform means that it appeals to the lowest common denominator. It embodies the very definition of "The dumbing down of society" because it requires that every complex idea expressed on the site must be condensed into a virtual post it note.

But algorithmic flaws and all, Twitter does exist in this form, and it's the dominant method of putting ideas out into the public arena, like it or not.

So the question is: do we want it to be run by people who arbitrarily censor content based on whom they agree with and whom they don't, or by people who are more inclusive and allow a greater diversity of opinion?

What's interesting to me is the fact that so many people are rooting for X to fail. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if that did happen, because it would end their virtual monopoly and hopefully a variety of other platforms will move in to fill the void.

As far as I'm concerned, the more ideas that are readily available to the public, the better - including ideas that are offensive, stupid, or even hateful. Let's get them out in the open where we can see what they are discuss them honestly and judge them on their merits, not on how they make us feel emotionally.

"Views people disagree with," "unpopular opinions," and so on, are phrases that are just as rhetorical and propagandistic as "hate speech" can be. All these expressions are exercises in trying to frame the discussion just so, so as to classify examples in ways that serve one's interests. In principle one can agree that a free society should allow the expression of unpopular opinions. Then someone comes along whose "unpopular" opinion is that so-and-so should go to the guillotine, and they get a mechanism handed to them that enables them to make this opinion very popular.

Which is precisely the problem, in that last line of your post; who is judging these "unpopular" ideas on their merits, who - holy crap - WHO is restraining how they stimulate and manipulate people's emotions? Never has the expression been truer, that a lie can run halfway round the world while the truth is still tying its shoelaces. Especially when the lie triggers people's fears, or anger, or outrage.

I've seen it over and over again; a meme, or a tweet, concocted so precisely that it layers lie upon lie - underlying assumptions to a political joke, say, where the joke is funny precisely because of a false assumption underlying it - where disentangling all the untruths and half-truths embedded in it, and even just briefly indicating the relevant evidence, takes five or six paragraphs to do. Hardly anyone will read that, and many, seeing a post paragraphs long, are already conditioned to dismiss it as a "rant" because multiple paragraphs on the internet must by nature be rants in their minds. I do this all the time, you know how I write and how I post. Nothing I post will ever go viral, because careful evidence-based reasoning CAN'T go viral. It's too slow, not snappy and not emotional enough to do that.

The alternative way to contend in the online battlefield of ideas is to play the same game, to make one's own memethink to fight back against the memethink of the folks with the guillotines. But that's no improvement, because the real struggle is not for one side or the other to "win," but for the culture to be able to think seriously about ideas on serious matters. If you resort to memethink, you've already lost, even if you get a bigger torch-and-pitchfork crowd on your side instead of theirs. The issue is not some "flaws" in the algorithm: the algorithm is BRILLIANT, it does EXACTLY what it was made to do - which is draw us all into memethink. That's a feature, not a glitch.

I am all in favor of making ideas as widely available to people as possible. But that's the irony; you do that better WITH gatekeepers, not by eliminating them. Even better, with education, to equip people to be good gatekeepers of their own minds. Algorithmic social media does the opposite; it doesn't introduce lots and lots of interesting ideas, it disorients and deconstructs with floods of nonsense. You want people to be able to assess many different ideas rationally, without emotion, but the whole point of the "engagement" algorithms on free social media platforms is that you get more of it quicker with emotional appeal than with rational argument, so once the wheel starts turning people get flooded with the emotional rather than the rational. People are finite and have only so much bandwidth to sort and process what's coming in. The scale and leverage of it all makes considered thought virtually impossible.

If an expert gave a person three or four alternative views on a question, they could listen and weigh them and come to a judgment. The expert could also moderate and keep the exponents of the views within boundaries to assure that their views were presented on genuine merits. But if you hurl seven hundred and three views at a person with no guide and no rules, they have no idea what they're looking at or listening to and no way to sort through it all, and wind up clinging to what suits their existing prejudices or appeals to their fears. That's why free thought requires gatekeepers.

 

[Standalone]

They're essentially unaccountable. What accountability there might have been has been weakened to negligibility (is that a word?) due to certain prevailing trends over the past forty years.

I think you’re looking for the word neglect. Neglect certainly has been a trend all around

 

[Standalone]

"Views people disagree with," "unpopular opinions," and so on, are phrases that are just as rhetorical and propagandistic as "hate speech" can be. All these expressions are exercises in trying to frame the discussion just so, so as to classify examples in ways that serve one's interests. In principle one can agree that a free society should allow the expression of unpopular opinions. Then someone comes along whose "unpopular" opinion is that so-and-so should go to the guillotine, and they get a mechanism handed to them that enables them to make this opinion very popular.

Which is precisely the problem, in that last line of your post; who is judging these "unpopular" ideas on their merits, who - holy crap - WHO is restraining how they stimulate and manipulate people's emotions? Never has the expression been truer, that a lie can run halfway round the world while the truth is still tying its shoelaces. Especially when the lie triggers people's fears, or anger, or outrage.

I've seen it over and over again; a meme, or a tweet, concocted so precisely that it layers lie upon lie - underlying assumptions to a political joke, say, where the joke is funny precisely because of a false assumption underlying it - where disentangling all the untruths and half-truths embedded in it, and even just briefly indicating the relevant evidence, takes five or six paragraphs to do. Hardly anyone will read that, and many, seeing a post paragraphs long, are already conditioned to dismiss it as a "rant" because multiple paragraphs on the internet must by nature be rants in their minds. I do this all the time, you know how I write and how I post. Nothing I post will ever go viral, because careful evidence-based reasoning CAN'T go viral. It's too slow, not snappy and not emotional enough to do that.

The alternative way to contend in the online battlefield of ideas is to play the same game, to make one's own memethink to fight back against the memethink of the folks with the guillotines. But that's no improvement, because the real struggle is not for one side or the other to "win," but for the culture to be able to think seriously about ideas on serious matters. If you resort to memethink, you've already lost, even if you get a bigger torch-and-pitchfork crowd on your side instead of theirs. The issue is not some "flaws" in the algorithm: the algorithm is BRILLIANT, it does EXACTLY what it was made to do - which is draw us all into memethink. That's a feature, not a glitch.

I am all in favor of making ideas as widely available to people as possible. But that's the irony; you do that better WITH gatekeepers, not by eliminating them. Even better, with education, to equip people to be good gatekeepers of their own minds. Algorithmic social media does the opposite; it doesn't introduce lots and lots of interesting ideas, it disorients and deconstructs with floods of nonsense. You want people to be able to assess many different ideas rationally, without emotion, but the whole point of the "engagement" algorithms on free social media platforms is that you get more of it quicker with emotional appeal than with rational argument, so once the wheel starts turning people get flooded with the emotional rather than the rational. People are finite and have only so much bandwidth to sort and process what's coming in. The scale and leverage of it all makes considered thought virtually impossible.

If an expert gave a person three or four alternative views on a question, they could listen and weigh them and come to a judgment. The expert could also moderate and keep the exponents of the views within boundaries to assure that their views were presented on genuine merits. But if you hurl seven hundred and three views at a person with no guide and no rules, they have no idea what they're looking at or listening to and no way to sort through it all, and wind up clinging to what suits their existing prejudices or appeals to their fears. That's why free thought requires gatekeepers.

Rhetorical efforts such as framing and making value judgements are surely not equal to propaganda.

There is the widest of spectrums along which these things exist, from hashing out opinions about tone wood here on one end to the worst propaganda that human history is all too capable of producing on the other.

I’ve skimmed and skipped part of reading your post, and am responding to its opening claim.

 

[Standalone]

I’ve read the rest of your post. Thank you for your evidence based writing and logic.

I see where you’re going with the rhetoric=propaganda thing but I think that’s only due to the enforced weirdness of the social media sphere. Something I’ve come to reject more and more strongly. That’s only a drop removed from a very large bucket though.

 

[socialleper]

If the lessons are on being an opportunist, fine.
If the lessons are on learning the hard way to stay in your lane and keep your mouth shut to avoid ruining your own reputation, fine.

The dude is over rated and I hope he loses every nickle he puts into Twitter (and I will only ever call it Twitter)

 

[hrodbert696]

Rhetorical efforts such as framing and making value judgements are surely not equal to propaganda.

There is the widest of spectrums along which these things exist, from hashing out opinions about tone wood here on one end to the worst propaganda that human history is all too capable of producing on the other.

I’ve skimmed and skipped part of reading your post, and am responding to its opening claim.

Of course - framing the question and the categories is an essential step to think about anything. My point is that in these kinds of debates, people choose a framing that serves their purposes, and that's often done in a propagandistic way. @hbarcat had offered the opinion, perhaps valid, that "hate speech" can get used to refer to a wider variety of expression than one might assume, so that valid criticism gets lumped together with deliberate harm. But the same can be said of an expression like "unpopular opinion," which can be that tort pickguards are ugly, or that a certain class of people should be guillotined. I just want to draw attention to the question of framing so as not to allow it to short-cut the argument.

 

[Standalone]

Of course - framing the question and the categories is an essential step to think about anything. My point is that in these kinds of debates, people choose a framing that serves their purposes, and that's often done in a propagandistic way. @hbarcat had offered the opinion, perhaps valid, that "hate speech" can get used to refer to a wider variety of expression than one might assume, so that valid criticism gets lumped together with deliberate harm. But the same can be said of an expression like "unpopular opinion," which can be that tort pickguards are ugly, or that a certain class of people should be guillotined. I just want to draw attention to the question of framing so as not to allow it to short-cut the argument.

Agreed!

Framing is so important that I jumped to defend it (it can be used for good) before reading your thoughtful and thought provoking post at length.

Heck, framing is one of my core competencies in surviving and communicating in this world — and, to be honest, in doing regular maintenance on mental and emotional health.

But I want to be a framing Jedi, not a Sith.

 

[MJ5150]

At the end of the day, if folks let social media platforms tell them what to think, that's quite unfortunate. Never would it cross my mind to jump on the Internet and see what folks on social media have to say about topic ABC. Why would I do that?
Perhaps I benefit from doing most of my growing up in a world without the Internet, like many of you.
Critical thinking is something every human should be doing on their own. Well, aside from those with aren't capable of such thought due to a disability, injury. When we don't, we empower people to have this kind of control, perceived or actual.

-Mike

 

[hbarcat]

They’ve thrown out the books in every library in each of the high schools in the city where I teach. Connecticut’s largest.

Free access to information is circling the drain in our society.

I skimmed some of your post, but my takeaway os that you’ve bought into the idea that this new internet thing is something that it in reality is not.

It reads you. You don’t (really) read it.

The information pipeline, while I. Some senses vast, is throttled at many choke points


Imagine trying to start a political movement that is against the interests of these giants…! It will never happen. Not in my lifetime.

I've been an information junkie my entire life. Never has there been such easy access to such an immense wealth of diverse information as there is right now.

I love books. I read actual paper books every single day. But more than 95% of the information I get these days comes from various online sources. I'm constantly amazed at what I can find with just a little bit of rather effortless searching.

I believe that the real problem lies at the user end. Most people only seek information from sources that make them feel good or validate their preconceived biases, so when there is such a richness of sources available, it's tempting to select only the ones that don't challenge you or make you feel uncomfortable.

I know that it's not fashionable to blame the common folk for any of the faults of society and instead blame Big Business, Big Government, Big Religion, Special Interests, or just "The Man", but sometimes it's just human nature to be lazy and ignorant.

 

[hbarcat]

"Views people disagree with," "unpopular opinions," and so on, are phrases that are just as rhetorical and propagandistic as "hate speech" can be. All these expressions are exercises in trying to frame the discussion just so, so as to classify examples in ways that serve one's interests. In principle one can agree that a free society should allow the expression of unpopular opinions. Then someone comes along whose "unpopular" opinion is that so-and-so should go to the guillotine, and they get a mechanism handed to them that enables them to make this opinion very popular.

Which is precisely the problem, in that last line of your post; who is judging these "unpopular" ideas on their merits, who - holy crap - WHO is restraining how they stimulate and manipulate people's emotions? Never has the expression been truer, that a lie can run halfway round the world while the truth is still tying its shoelaces. Especially when the lie triggers people's fears, or anger, or outrage.

I've seen it over and over again; a meme, or a tweet, concocted so precisely that it layers lie upon lie - underlying assumptions to a political joke, say, where the joke is funny precisely because of a false assumption underlying it - where disentangling all the untruths and half-truths embedded in it, and even just briefly indicating the relevant evidence, takes five or six paragraphs to do. Hardly anyone will read that, and many, seeing a post paragraphs long, are already conditioned to dismiss it as a "rant" because multiple paragraphs on the internet must by nature be rants in their minds. I do this all the time, you know how I write and how I post. Nothing I post will ever go viral, because careful evidence-based reasoning CAN'T go viral. It's too slow, not snappy and not emotional enough to do that.

The alternative way to contend in the online battlefield of ideas is to play the same game, to make one's own memethink to fight back against the memethink of the folks with the guillotines. But that's no improvement, because the real struggle is not for one side or the other to "win," but for the culture to be able to think seriously about ideas on serious matters. If you resort to memethink, you've already lost, even if you get a bigger torch-and-pitchfork crowd on your side instead of theirs. The issue is not some "flaws" in the algorithm: the algorithm is BRILLIANT, it does EXACTLY what it was made to do - which is draw us all into memethink. That's a feature, not a glitch.

I am all in favor of making ideas as widely available to people as possible. But that's the irony; you do that better WITH gatekeepers, not by eliminating them. Even better, with education, to equip people to be good gatekeepers of their own minds. Algorithmic social media does the opposite; it doesn't introduce lots and lots of interesting ideas, it disorients and deconstructs with floods of nonsense. You want people to be able to assess many different ideas rationally, without emotion, but the whole point of the "engagement" algorithms on free social media platforms is that you get more of it quicker with emotional appeal than with rational argument, so once the wheel starts turning people get flooded with the emotional rather than the rational. People are finite and have only so much bandwidth to sort and process what's coming in. The scale and leverage of it all makes considered thought virtually impossible.

If an expert gave a person three or four alternative views on a question, they could listen and weigh them and come to a judgment. The expert could also moderate and keep the exponents of the views within boundaries to assure that their views were presented on genuine merits. But if you hurl seven hundred and three views at a person with no guide and no rules, they have no idea what they're looking at or listening to and no way to sort through it all, and wind up clinging to what suits their existing prejudices or appeals to their fears. That's why free thought requires gatekeepers.

As is usually the case with your thorough and thoughtful posts @hrodbert696 I pretty much agree with it, and even enthusiastically so.

But I think what's missing from your post is the the fact that the IT genie is out of the bottle and there's no possibility of going back to the pre internet days of information sharing from the source to the masses.

The new reality is that in every free secular democracy on Earth (and even in quite a lot of the less free ones) there are oceans of information available to anybody, virtually instantly, with almost no effort or cost.

This information can be true or false, good or bad, benevolent or sinister, useful or hazardous, and everything in between.

There is nothing stopping anyone from accessing any of it. However, there are a great many special interests that want very much to guide as many people as possible to their bits of information because they'll either profit for it or gain power and influence from it.

That's here to stay, and it's pointless to wish for some kind of internet police force that will be able to automatically recognize bad information in a truly objective manner and shunt information consumers away from it and herd them towards good information.

If you know of a way to accomplish this, then I'd be ecstatic to hear it. But I don't bekieve that it's possible. From my perspective, the ONLY solution is for society to admit that the problem is at the user end and to start teaching ourselves how to think critically - starting with our kids. The next generation should ideally be a lot less gullible and so easily led by charlatans, cranks, and demagogues.

 

[WG Plum]

Or truth will have no meaning, which is another enterely possible outcome. 'Flooding the zone' has been working.