If something has a lot of very bad externalities, and just the ones we know about are visibly, obviously causing major damage to important physical, social and informational ecosystems around us, then “lots of people want it” just isn’t a compelling argument.
Thinking about other industries like we think about data centers shows how impoverished the debate is
Clumsy, arbitrary environmental ideas ignore the incredible complexity of the systems modern society depends on
interfluidity » The great game of global public goods provision
War is bad. Excuses should not be made for it. All sides should work to end this and every war as quickly as possible and shift to modes of bargaining and competition that are not profoundly destructive.
What's Wrong With This Idea?
One of my favorite questions is: “What’s wrong with this idea?” It drives the conversation away from why the idea is great, and toward finding its flaws. That is invaluable in technology.
Bias, Skew, and Search Engines Are Sufficient to Explain Online Toxicity
America's Digital Demand Threatens Black Communities with More Pollution
The collective costs of artificial intelligence and data centers are disproportionately harming Black households.
The social media discourse of engaged partisans is toxic even when politics are irrelevant
Abstract Prevailing theories of partisan incivility on social media suggest that it derives from disagreement about political issues or from status competition between groups. This study—which analyzes the commenting behavior of Reddit users across diverse cultural contexts (subreddits)—tests the alternative hypothesis that such incivility derives in large part from a selection effect: Toxic people are especially likely to opt into discourse in partisan contexts. First, we examined commenting behavior across over 9,000 unique cultural contexts (subreddits) and confirmed that discourse is indeed more toxic in partisan (e.g. r/progressive, r/conservatives) than in nonpartisan contexts (e.g. r/movies, r/programming). Next, we analyzed hundreds of millions of comments from over 6.3 million users and found robust evidence that: (i) the discourse of people whose behavior is especially toxic in partisan contexts is also especially toxic in nonpartisan contexts (i.e. people are not politics-only toxicity specialists); and (ii) when considering only nonpartisan contexts, the discourse of people who also comment in partisan contexts is more toxic than the discourse of people who do not. These effects were not driven by socialization processes whereby people overgeneralized toxic behavioral norms they had learned in partisan contexts. In contrast to speculation about the need for partisans to engage beyond their echo chambers, toxicity in nonpartisan contexts was higher among people who also comment in both left-wing and right-wing contexts (bilaterally engaged users) than among people who also comment in only left-wing or right-wing contexts (unilaterally engaged users). The discussion considers implications for democratic functioning and theories of polarization.
Value and vulnerability: a framework for understanding the complexity of misinformation use
Why does misinformation influence some and not others? Vulnerability is often mischaracterized as personal weakness or deficiency, or as susceptibility to “infection” or “pollution”—dehumanizing descriptions that highlight supposed shortcomings of media consumers. We propose a broader perspective that focuses on the value of misinformation to persons, groups, and platforms that adopt or share it. The Vulnerability and Value (VV) framework conceptualizes vulnerability as arising from interconnected scales and systems of valuation. Using a complex adaptive systems framing, we describe how misinformation can generate value for individuals, groups, and platforms. When misinformation spreads successfully, it often does so because it serves purposes that extend beyond veracity. Its spread indicates something significant is at stake for those who believe or facilitate it. A key contribution of the VV framework is to formalize the tradeoff individuals face: whether to question and evaluate misinformation or to accept and share it.
We argue badly, and nothing accumulates. How could we do better? | Reason Commons — Issue Trees & Logical Thinking Process
Millions of people argue every day about the things that matter most — climate change, what to do about AI, how we might build a better world. Some of it is sharp, even insightful. And almost none of it accumulates.
Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet
It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes.
Alienation, Idealization, and Modeling
Models allow us to expose, explore, and excavate our assumptions. This is especially true for the sorts of assumptions that concern scholars of marginalization and resistance, who aim to show how ...
I can see a whole lot of people agreeing with this. Kinda the same with open source in general, but few open source projects are social protocols seeking widespread adoption. It's a particular flavor of narrative disconnection from reality we have to bridge out of to get out of our own way.
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Every @proto developer sounds like this to me:
I am disappointed by the fact that so many seem tempted to share a "nonrigorous", unserious attempt at quantifying fraud in science because it passes some silly vibe check ("I asked others and they agree"). So in the name of good science, we're ready to produce bad science as a rhetorical tool.
Same argument was made about smartphones (“expensive, elitist, not accessible to most of the world”). Now most of the world has smartphones. Why? Economies of scale and learning curves. You have to start with the easy part of the adoption curve before you can reach the hard part of adoption curve.
David Zipper
Robotaxis create serious problems in big, dense cities, but they’d be a godsend in small towns and rural areas—huge swaths of America that the AV industry is ignoring. My latest, in Bloomberg (gift link) 🧵
Keep coming back to the idea that—ideally—the Atmosphere ultimately wants to become something like a public utility. But obviously not an American public utility. But also not a European one, nor one belonging to any conventional state. A new type of thing entirely—a global public utility.
Every time I make the (correct) statement that social media use is not universally bad for teenagers, or state that the best consensus is that it's beneficial-to-neutral for many and any negative effects are a small subset of teenagers, people demand citations (and then refuse to believe them, sigh)
