Erlend Sogge Heggen (@erlend.sh)

Erlend Sogge Heggen (@erlend@writing.exchange)

3.88K Posts, 688 Following, 1.28K Followers · Bullish on kindness. 
 Founder of Spicy Lobster studios and Weird. https://weird.one Formerly VP of Community / Product Lead at Discourse. #opensource #gamedev #fediverse

A Knowledge Commons for the 21st Century

Truth-seeking infrastructure at scale

From Users to (Sense)Makers: On the Pivotal Role of Stigmergic Social Annotation in the Quest for Collective Sensemaking

The web has become a dominant epistemic environment, influencing people's beliefs at a global scale. However, online epistemic environments are increasingly polluted, impairing societies' ability to coordinate effectively in the face of global crises. We argue that centralized platforms are a main source of epistemic pollution, and that healthier environments require redesigning how we collectively govern attention. Inspired by decentralization and open source software movements, we propose Open Source Attention, a socio-technical framework for "freeing" human attention from control by platforms, through a decentralized eco-system for creating, storing and querying stigmergic markers; the digital traces of human attention.

For You, For Everyone - Graze Newsletter

How Graze built a "composable personalization" engine for the open social web — and why it matters right now.

For You, For Everyone - Graze Newsletter

How Graze built a "composable personalization" engine for the open social web — and why it matters right now.

Beyond Misinformation: Social Media and the Sculpting of Epistemic Agency

ABSTRACT The dominant account of social media's epistemic harms focuses on the spread of misinformation and the production of false beliefs at scale. This paper argues that the misinformation narrative, whatever its merits, has obscured a deeper and more intimate form of epistemic damage. Dominant social media platforms do not merely supply bad inputs to stable epistemic machinery. They reshape the machinery itself. I argue that social media platforms are powerful engines for sculpting epistemic agency via two mechanisms: normative learning, through which users internalize descriptive and injunctive norms about how to interact with evidence, and reinforcement learning, through which habitual patterns of epistemic response are developed. In these ways, platforms can reshape users' epistemic styles, including their testimonial policies, evidential thresholds for belief revision, and theoretical values governing how they select explanations. This should trouble us, as the constraints driving which styles are produced are systematically orthogonal to truth and ignore information about the environments agents inhabit. This discussion identifies a neglected form of epistemic hostility: not the exploitation of existing cognitive vulnerabilities to implant false beliefs, but the production of new vulnerabilities that can then be exploited. From this, more and better evidence cannot save us.

🌸 ellie 🌸 on Twitter / X

One benefit of a “proof of fidelity” system where you aren’t trying to solve for such a narrow question of “is this a human”, is that you don’t need to rely on means of validation that can be biased or inaccessible for many actual humans, such as gov IDs or irl events.2/x— 🌸 ellie 🌸 (@heyellieday) July 29, 2021

How Social Media Rewards Misinformation

A majority of false stories are spread by a small number of frequent users, suggests a new study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Gizem Ceylan. But they can be taught to change their ways.