Well that's not the regulation that's been talked about here so far, which is regulation of content. If you open that up to regulation of company structures themselves, that's a much bigger step in the right direction, but still highly unlikely under current political conditions.Yossarian wrote:Why not regulation? For a start, you could use regulation to democratise and demonetise social media feeds by breaking up these companies. Why is that not the answer?
It's the same with so many social problems. The only way to really change one thing is to change everything.poprock wrote:You’re right there. But you’re also right here:JonB wrote:If you take out the need to maximise engagement, that already opens up a different approach.And, as you suggest, the two aren’t compatible. You can’t have a neutral public commons that’s privately funded. Not under our system of capitalism.JonB wrote:I realise that de-monetisation and democratisation of platforms isn't about to happen.
With social computing systems and algorithms having been shown to give rise to unintended consequences, one of the suspected success criteria is their ability to integrate and utilize people's inherent cognitive biases. Biases can be present in users, systems and their contents. With HCI being at the forefront of designing and developing user-facing computing systems, we bear special responsibility for increasing awareness of potential issues and working on solutions to mitigate problems arising from both intentional and unintentional effects of cognitive biases. This workshop brings together designers, developers, and thinkers across disciplines to redefine computing systems by focusing on inherent biases in people and systems and work towards a research agenda to mitigate their effects. By focusing on cognitive biases from content or system as well as from a human perspective, this workshop will sketch out blueprints for systems that contribute to advancing technology and media literacy, building critical thinking skills, and depolarization by design.
Suppose there were good access to good data and good models. How would an author write a document incorporating them?
Today, even the most modern writing tools are designed around typing in words, not facts. These tools are suitable for promoting preconceived ideas, but provide no help in ensuring that words reflect reality, or any plausible model of reality. They encourage authors to fool themselves, and fool others.
(Richard Feynman) The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
Imagine an authoring tool designed for arguing from evidence. I don’t mean merely juxtaposing a document and reference material, but literally “autocompleting” sourced facts directly into the document. Perhaps the tool would have built-in connections to fact databases and model repositories, not unlike the built-in spelling dictionary. What if it were as easy to insert facts, data, and models as it is to insert emoji and cat photos?
GurtTractor wrote:I think it's a fool's errand to try and fix or coerce the existing big platforms into a better state. We need a proper alternative that isn't profit motivated, some kind of decentralised network would be a way forward i.e. something P2P or federated. There's significant technical challenges to getting something like that working well, and better than what we currently have from the average user's perspective. The failed or ongoing projects that I've seen tend to look like rather uninspiring reimaginings of the current sites, from the research I've done about past user interface and computing system ideas I've seen that there's all manner of very promising concepts that could make computing and communication much better.
Technologies themselves never get us out of trouble. It's always a question of who controls them and the ends they're put to.GurtTractor wrote:This is what I mean when I say I'm most hopeful for new technologies to get us out of trouble, of course they tend to bring new and different problems but we'll just have to keep marching on and deal with them as we go.
Yossarian wrote:You want a decentralised social network? Here’s 12: https://bitshills.com/best-decentralized-social-media-networks/ How many people do you know on any of them?
JonB wrote:Technologies themselves never get us out of trouble. It's always a question of who controls them and the ends they're put to.GurtTractor wrote:This is what I mean when I say I'm most hopeful for new technologies to get us out of trouble, of course they tend to bring new and different problems but we'll just have to keep marching on and deal with them as we go.
Yossarian wrote:No, let’s not do that. We have something that we know can have an immediate effect. Maybe not a perfect effect, but one that can be refined later on if needs be.
GurtTractor wrote:Again at the river analogy at some point there might be more earthen barrier than there is village. At some point the band aid becomes it's own major problem.
Yossarian wrote:What? How many centuries have we been passing laws for in this country? How many regulations have been written and replaced? What issues has that caused for anyone not studying law?Again at the river analogy at some point there might be more earthen barrier than there is village. At some point the band aid becomes it's own major problem.
GurtTractor wrote:Yossarian wrote:What? How many centuries have we been passing laws for in this country? How many regulations have been written and replaced? What issues has that caused for anyone not studying law?GurtTractor wrote:Again at the river analogy at some point there might be more earthen barrier than there is village. At some point the band aid becomes it's own major problem.
In the worst cases laws can become an issue, at the very least they fail to address the causes. Think of proposals to ban all pointy knives or fit them all with GPS chips as a way of combating knife violence for example, that's a mental example but you can see how some people want things to go that far and address the symptom rather than the cause. Problems with hate groups forming? Ban forming groups! etc etc. There will be real laws that are actual examples of this but I'm not versed enough atm to bring examples right now.
Passing a law or regulating something to make the world a better place is the least we should do.
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