Real talk. The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology] enables them to manipulated into building systems which reproduce and reinforce social structures and social relations in ways that they would otherwise object to.
To the degree that we've collectively built a dark forest, it's been in part due to this lack of multi-disciplinarianism.
It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance, largely due to exponentially better and cheaper compute, as well as tools for distributed collaboration.
But depressingly few of my peers seem to be true general "artisan scientists" as I see it, understanding engineering to be not only a job but a craft, a discipline, an art form, a power and a responsibility.
So much is possible today. Individuals in developed countries, and even many in underdeveloped countries with access to tech, have more velocity at their fingertips than almost any individual in history.
We've built critical systems which rapidly create value with the slightest gesture. But few really take the time to sit down and connect enough dots to see enough of a bigger picture to make meaningful and considerate modifications to the status quo. Few push back against what they're told, few take the time to deeply appreciate even a fraction of the complex systems which create modern society.
We have to do better about educating ourselves, our peers, and our offspring. We need to encourage generalists, facilitate access to multi-disciplinarian education, and hold ourselves and others to higher ethical standards which are themselves informed by a broad perspective.
This certainly comes at the cost of one's personal time. However, I think a majority of us are overentertained and could be better about conditioning ourselves to routinely seek out and learn new things.
> It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance
I'm sorry to rebutt your very first assertion but we had been in a cultural and scientific Renaissance and the last 15 years have been the slow unwinding of that. We got lucky that the internet explosion overlapped with the tail end of publicly supported cultural and scientific production.
I hung out with physics majors in college, all of them smarter than us compsci chuds, and uniformly they are absolutely struggling to survive as post docs or in industry. One of my college buddies has worked at nasa for 4 different firms and has had to move to Texas, Kansas, and Maryland for these gigs and has once again landed on a project where the funding got cut and is looking for a new job. Another works in nano scale semiconducting and had to move to Finland to get project funding from the EU since the US has made basic research funding so scarce. And after several post doc roles he is leaving the field after his last grant wasn't renewed, with not an ounce of negative feedback. Just, sorry we don't have any money anymore. He's now going to go into failure analysis for a mobile phone manufacturer to pay the bills.
The woes of cultural production have also been well documented.
Universities charge stupid amounts (50%+) of overhead to researchers. The PIs basically run a lab, hustle for the funding writing grant proposals, and uni takes a big fat cut of whatever funding gets pulled in. And that overhead all gets spent on useless administration, buildings and facilities, investments, and basically anything other than the research the grant was for.
The problem is that there's so little money in academia. In the US, state support for public universities has plummeted in the 21st century. In the last state I lived in, the state university near me went from providing over 75% of teaching costs to under 25% in less than 20 years. Tuitions have risen, but it's important to understand the sticker prices are usually discounted with financial aid. If a university raises tuitions by an amount x, they are usually brining in less than 1/2 x new funding. Ironically, reducing university funding leads universities hire more administrators, as they attempt to replace lost funding with donations or indirect costs.
Scarcity and the relentless competitive zero-sum slugfest of living makes everything a cost-benefit calculation: I have a limited number of waking hours and most of them are dedicated to battling it out for resources so I and my family can live. You can put your time into Enterprise, Entertainment, or Enlightenment, but anyone who does anything other than 100% Enterprise is losing out to those who do.
I would love to choose to be an artisan, a craftsman, a changer of the world, a multi-discipline Renaissance Man, (or just an over-entertained couch potato) but I need to make my mortgage payment next month.
Jay Z had a section in decoded where he talked about how his needs as a young man getting into drug dealing quickly and seamlessly switched from food to new clothes to a Lexus - how what started as something he needed to do because they needed money for food became a pursuit of wealth and status almost without him noticing. I don't know your financial or family situation, so don't take this as a critique of you personally, but I think that happens to a lot of people - we don't recognize when the things we're treating as our material needs have moved well beyond where we'd consider trading off for things like meaningful work or a life aligned with our personal values.
I agree, and I didn't mean to make it seem like it was easy. The system is purposefully stacked against us such that the amount of creative, highly-agentic minds are kept to a minimum in order to maintain the status quo.
For the most part, our station in life is something we constantly wage war against from the moment of birth. Coming from a very poor and abusive background, I was homeless by 16 and left with a choice of fully committing to boring technical work, or taking advantage of already being at rock bottom and surgically improving my skills over years until I've become as well-rounded as I would like. It's a lifelong journey, though.
I do wish you luck and I hope you do find time to accomplish some of your desires. You will definitely have to create time and space for it though, free time likely won't magically appear within your current routine.
Go take improv classes. It's a lot of fun and now you have a skill that let you perform in any major metropolitan area without needing a script or much preparation, other than warmups if that's what they do.
But yeah, people should be curious and willing to try things, even things that doesn't seem to be the thing for them.
I'll pile onto that. I love improv. It gave me a new set of mental skills that are difficult to train for elsewhere. It teaches you how to walk in a room and make the best of any situation and overcome that feeling of meeting strangers. I find any difficult work situation I can now approach from a "what can we do with this?" mentality, where I used to always dread rolling up my sleeves to do more work. Highly recommended to anyone, but especially anyone in a leadership role.
When I was an infant taking my first couple years of EE I joined right in with everyone else ridiculing the "basket weavers".
Now I say that stem is just a tool that does no good by itself. It's just as harmful as beneficial. An engineer doesn't like to think of themself as a tool, but tough shit. Without the humanities an engineer is exactly that, merely a tool that others wield, and others decide how to wield and to what ends.
Stem tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb. The humanities tells you whether/when/why to build a bridge or a bomb.
It also made us worser engineers unable to contemplate the computer in front of the computer . We cyclical reinvent the wheels and our brightest regularly bump into the limitations of self projecting themselves upon everyone they meet.
We need a field that is able to systematically cartograph the limitations our brains impose on us, society and technology. We need a world map of blindspots, of disabilities l. Not 15 years ago we congratulated ourselves on plans to degrowth , and look at what happened during the pandemic.
> The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology]
While I agree that disdain is not the right reaction, neither is misdescribing what these disciplines are. And the most important fact about them is: they are not sciences.
We do not have a science of how people work, how groups of people work, how collective action works. Dealing with people is an art. It requires applying non-repeatable human judgments to non-repeatable human situations, and doing so constantly, day after day, year after year, realizing that there is never going to be a stable state of things, there is never going to be a time when you have dealt with all the conflicts and solved all the problems and can sit back and relax.
Engineers are understandably uncomfortable with such a situation because it goes against everything we (I say "we" because I'm an engineer myself) are taught. We are taught to engineer solutions to problems, solutions that keep working, if not forever, at least for a long enough time that we aren't constantly having to manage them. A well built bridge does not require constant engineer attention once it is finished.
But there is no such thing when it comes to humans and human relationships. They do require constant attention in order to survive and flourish. But we have no science of how to do that, the way we have a science of how to build bridges. All we have is our fallible human judgment, and if we're lucky, some rules of thumb that, while they aren't science, are hopefully better than nothing. Unfortunately, I think what rules of thumb we have have been mostly ignored in the process of building systems like social media.
Sociology - despite being a science - isn't required to be one in order to fulfill the objective we're discussing. It simply has to be capable of teaching people to identify things they take for granted [being universally true] to in fact be a consequence of their society.
To that degree, studying enough sociology to be able to make the statement, "Compartmentalization and hierarchy of academic subjects contributes to software engineers being unwitting used to replicate social structures," is not dependent on sociology being a science. It is true without relying on an arbitrary epistemology.
The main problem isn't that it isn't a science, but that to the extent that science is used in sociology, it's mostly badly done.
Findings don't replicate, data is used to tell lies, policy built on scientific findings is mostly unrelated to the findings, focus is primarily guided by culture instead of discovery or curiosity. I read a lot of sociology, and the general level of critical thinking and concern for the truth in journal articles is much lower than biology, engineering, or even economics.
> We absolutely have statistical and theoretical frameworks for evaluating collective behavior.
Yes, we do, but their predictive power, if it exists at all, is very poor. Science is about building models with good predictive power. If you don't have that, you don't have a science, at least not in any way that matters.
Hamilton (the founding father) considered political science a science, and explicitly argues in the federalist papers how it has the equivalent of axioms that one can build and reason from
How well have the predictions made by reasoning from those axioms worked out?
It's true that the most egregiously wrong prediction in the Federalist papers, that the US would not have political parties because it was too large, was the work of Madison, not Hamilton. But AFAIK none of Hamilton's predictions turned out very well either.
These “soft sciences” have actually been responsible for 100s of millions of deaths in the 20th century.
Many times these practitioners of these ”soft sciences” are cloistered away in the ivory towers of academia and away from regular people whom they actually look down on because they don’t match their theories.
Lol, I would have guessed you've been here long enough to experience it. :) It's probably not most folks, but when the topics of sociology and psychology come up there's definitely a contingent who reply with contempt.
This isn't a new concept, but the compartmentalization of subjects in school is one of the factors at play along with a hierarchy of subjects and students. You can observe how a lot of computer science folks hold mathematics and physics in high regard, and biologists, and sociologists in low regard. It's no coincidence that this maps to relative possession of the habitus valued by the ideological hegemony.
Again, it works to reinforce social statuses rather than dismantle them, often in ways that are detrimental to those actively, albeit unknowingly, contributing to the same systems.
I'm confused about what you guys keep getting at here when you say vague stuff like "reinforcing social statuses". I hope it's not what I think it is.
My issues with the "soft" sciences, is chiefly their inability to replicate findings, and the paradoxical authority these so called scientists seem to gain despite not actually following the scientific method. It doesn't have to be this way either.
I'm not saying everything in these fields are total bunk or anything but I've been deceived by them enough by now that they have lost my trust. I'm sure there are plenty that actually do good science but I'm not capable of telling them apart from the rest unfortunately.
Even more concerning is this pretentious attitude reminiscent of what I'd expect from a religion or political movement than a field of science. Are we starting to treat universitys like cathedrals now? A scary thought.
Dark forest Vs real could probably be described by networks.
Also Social Media Networks are conversational markets, run by market makers with different kinds of incentives. I do not recall seeing descriptions like this but it would bring real empathy to the space to merely describe things like this.
Broadcast all is NOT the norm in price discovery. Why is it the starting point in social networks? We are brainwashed.
The degree to which a science is valuable is proportional to the degree to which it would keep working if we finally wiped out humans and the goddamned whining stopped. Physics wouldn't notice, sociology would become irrelevant.
This is an interesting point, but how do you this psychology as a field has or usefully could push against such forces? Is that its role even accidentally?
Another way of saying this is: everything non-trivial you build embeds at least a little bit of cultural baggage.
If you’re not thinking about that it just means you have no idea what stuff you are loading into your designs. It’s still there you’re just not aware of it. It’s like being the unwitting carrier of a disease or a parasite.
Makes me think of brain slugs in Futurama for some reason.
It would help if those "soft sciences" had any sort of reproducible outcomes. As far as I can tell every instance of these "soft sciences" are just an arm of the geopolitical body/state that backs them...with the sole purpose of rationalizing what ever that states status quo is.
Can you give an example? It seems like you have a lot to share but stopped short at a vague implication of a shadowy elite controlling entire academic subjects.
> […] and trickle down and Reaganomics, to start with.
Ideas that were not taken seriously even by the people who put them forward:
> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27]
> Political opponents of the Reagan administration soon seized on this language in an effort to brand the administration as caring only about the wealthy.[28] In 1982, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the "trickle-down economics" that David Stockman was referring to was previously known under the name "horse-and-sparrow theory", the idea that feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat.[29] Reagan administration officials including Michael Deaver wanted Stockman to be fired in response to his comments, but he was ultimately kept on in exchange for a private apology.[30]
It'd be like saying traffic engineering and urban design are bullshit because politicians keeps building highways—when traffic engineers know this won't solve the issue of traffic:
Just because quack ideas attributed to a particular field are used to justify certain ideological ideas or policies does not mean the field itself is devoid of valid models.
There's more to knowledge than just reproducible outcomes.
For example, history is frustrating because you are going to end up in unique circumstances and you're not going to be able to see into the future, only the present. Yet, we must at least have an understanding of the world around us and critical thinking skills that can only come from with doing history.
Are you really saying that psychology doesn’t have “any sort of reproducible outcomes,” or are you not including that one in your definition of “soft sciences?” The comment you’re replying to explicitly did, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Because Skinner boxes exist. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built around them (casinos, gacha games/loot boxes), just to pick a super low-hanging-fruit example.
How aware of them do you consider yourself to be? There's an entire field of literature called critical theory that's explicitly dedicated to challenging the status quo. My own field (anthropology/archeology) does it so commonly that there are multiple terms for slightly different shades of it (public, applied, postcolonial, etc).
> As far as I can tell every instance of these "soft sciences" are just an arm of the geopolitical body/state that backs them...with the sole purpose of rationalizing what ever that states status quo is.
This is 100% a sociological take though. Ie: it is in part doing sociology. Perhaps without knowing it, you've arrived at an Althusserian perspective on structuralism through the lens of conflict theory.
Do you suppose that these institutions be systematically studied and can we build models of how they work to reproduce the status quo?
If you suspect that you're being lied to by the consensus, feel free to read alternatives by heterodox scholars. I suspected that they're crank.
It's not like I particularly agree with the way things work now, only that we shouldn't make things worse by making obviously stupid moves in the wrong direction.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Engineers due tend to be pretty critical of things that can’t be accurately and consistently measured (not meant as a slight. It’s true, but it doesn’t make those soft sciences worthless), but they aren’t the only ones making these systems.
Most of the time, engineers are given requirements and build systems to satisfy them.
You wouldn’t blame a construction worker for gentrification, right?
They always keep on asserting that 'multi-disciplinarianism' (always in the form of the less practical being pushed on the more practical, never the other way around despite the obvious role in understanding reality in well, understanding reality). They never worry about being detached from reality from their distance to the objective. It reeks of the bad old days of classical philosophy where they considered estrangement from reality an intrinsic virtue as "purity of thought" and looked down upon those who dealt with banal reality.
I have yet to see any actual backing for such claims. Only standard academia's toxic social knife-fighting and Kafka-traps. The specific form of bullshit being mounting social pressure as a weapon. Where where not agreeing with them and their theories means clearly you are more wrong and a worse person for not agreeing with them and thus you must agree with them!
It always rung of a scam to justify mandatory electives to justify the existence of their professorships. There is no intellectual honesty to be found here, only snobbery and blind adherence to cliches.
AI, bots, and the constant need to fuel training, turns the internet forest into a place where anything a person publishes will be vampirically consumed, mimicked to see whether it can replicate whatever value could be had, and capitalized on if possible or ignored if not.
It’s an interesting contrast to actual dark forest theory—-AI doesn’t want to destroy us, so we don’t need to hide for existential sake. But imagine walking outside and as soon as you do, innumerable copies of you spring up, and each action and sound you make is replicated and amplified. Like a weird Phantom Tollbooth meets Alice in Wonderland on DMT
> AI, bots, and the constant need to fuel training, turns the internet forest into a place where anything a person publishes will be vampirically consumed, mimicked to see whether it can replicate whatever value could be had, and capitalized on if possible or ignored if not.
That's honestly not a problem, unless someone believes they're entitled to 100% of value generated by their interactions with the world - but that's a level of greed way beyond Scrooge McDuck, and the kind of thinking that defines the dreaded "late stage capitalism".
It really is an option to publish something and not care about knowing exactly who read it, and what they're doing with it.
Why do you think that business value is the only thing to look at here? If someone starts copying my likeness, mannerisms, writing style, etc. they could also use that to damage my reputation or harm my relations with other people. I think that those two possibilities represent irreparable harms with no associated business value.
> If someone starts copying my likeness, mannerisms, writing style, etc. they could also use that to damage my reputation or harm my relations with other people. I think that those two possibilities represent irreparable harms with no associated business value.
There's 8 billion people on the planet. Unless you're a celebrity, this is not a real problem for you at this point (and if you are, it's a business problem).
There's no way for a large model learning on the entirety of the Internet to somehow convert "copying likeness, mannerisms, writing style, etc." into damaging your reputation; doing that is something hyper-targeted, and at this point (and in conceivable future), there's no middle ground between "plausible deniability" and "someone targeting you specifically, which they could do just as well in pre-AI times".
You're also not as unique as you think. There are many people with same mannerism, many people with same writing style, etc. Nor are those things constant over time.
The flip side of not being a unique snowflake is also that anyone's contributions to the public Internet are, for purposes of AI training, worth approximately $0 on the margin, and impact the model just as much. It's in the volume of data that the patterns emerge that LLMs learn, volume too big for any person to be entitled to a meaningful part of it.
You could also make the same argument about check forgery or wire fraud. "If someone passes a bad check in your name it's not a big deal because you're only one of 8 billion." However when it happens to you, specifically, it's a big deal because you have to fight the bank and the merchant over it.
"You're not special" is a bad argument for why someone impersonating you isn't a problem. I mean even Black Mirror explained why impersonation is a problem in the very first episode many years ago. You don't even have to be a celebrity, you only have to be in someone else's way.
> You could also make the same argument about check forgery or wire fraud.
You couldn't, because unlike all the things we discussed about AI, those are actually harming the victim in real, direct terms.
Having some model who doesn't know or care about you talking just like you, without claiming it's actually you, to a bunch of people who don't know or care you exist? That's zero actual damage to you.
> "You're not special" is a bad argument for why someone impersonating you isn't a problem. I mean even Black Mirror explained why impersonation is a problem in the very first episode many years ago.
I remember that episode. However, my argument isn't "you're not special, therefore impersonating you isn't a problem" - it's "you're not special, so what you think is impersonating you probably isn't, and even if, it doesn't hurt you in real terms", combined with "anything that's actual impersonation and/or hurts you directly was already possible, and AI currently doesn't impact this at all". Someone wants to screw with you? You're being targeted. AI might make the attacker's job a bit easier, but it's still someone going through the effort, vs. a background process on the Internet everyone seems to think LLMs are.
Also: there's an inverse relationship between weight of accusations and social proximity. A specific person you know (and other people know you know) accusing you of something? It's a problem. Some random comments from random accounts, accusing you and 100 different people of something? Most people won't believe it.
(Except when it's about child abuse. People are extremely sensitive to this - just bringing up the term and a name in the same sentence can ruin the victim's life.)
> It really is an option to publish something and not care about knowing exactly who read it, and what they're doing with it.
In a world with UBI (or in a world where creators are aristocracy who don’t have to worry about money) I would agree. In a world of precarity, obviously many people are going to desire to limit reuse of their creations unless they get rewarded for it somehow.
Except all those people performatively declaring their refusal to comment on forums and write blog posts, they're not actually making their money this way. LLMs take away nothing from them, except maybe inflated sense of uniqueness.
I can understand why all kinds of artists, who make money from their creative work, have an issue with generative models. But I feel this is unavoidable - graphics and writing and video creation will follow the same path music already did decades above. For a long time now, bands and singers don't make their living through their songs and recordings. They make it through live performances and branded merch, and related things. Music is too cheap to meter, but human connection isn't, which is why musicians make money by being entertainers. This is the fate that awaits other creative arts too.
The artists who don't mind not making money from their work itself, have built a personal brand to obtain other sources of income. But the future that the OP describes, and which feels quite believable, is one where AI defeats humans even at building a monetized brand around obtained content, so there isn't anything left for humans. I am much less optimistic than you that people will demand human connection, I think they will be satisfied with a convincing enough simulacrum.
It's the same reason why you can't use pictures of people in public or their quotes or tweets for commercial reasons without permission: there's a general concept of human dignity and privacy that includes people's thoughts, words, and appearances/etc as belonging to them. It's not greedy to want respect for basic human autonomy.
Plus pragmatically speaking this sounds suspiciously like something that's "not a problem" until it is a problem. If a poorly written LLM regurgitates my name and lines from a blog post (or god forbid hallucinates a blog post by me as a citation) in some defense of Pol Pot or something that's going to be come a problem for me very quickly.
EDIT: Fridge thought: quite frankly if someone's making money off my interactions in this economy you can bet your last dollar I want my fair share of it. It's not greedy to gain value from your interactions with the world: you already do by interacting since that's a bi-lateral relationship ie it affects each party equally. It IS greedy for a third party who did not participate in the interaction to expect value from it.
It is not about being entitled to 100% of all the value.
It is about the right to have my own value not diluted.
It is not about caring to know who read each one of my words.
It is about the fact that people can later say „xyz wrote that” instead of „oh well another AI generated crap comment” when in reality it was someone’s original thought.
It is not capitalism, but basic respect for other human being.
"There are no fully original thoughts, everything is a remix." -- Socrates, ~370 BC.
"We attribute a thought to a person through a chain of custody. Without it, the thought could be attributed to anyone, or to a generative language model. Not that it matters anyway." -- Abraham Lincoln, ~1862.
I mean, AI truly doesn’t want to destroy us, it can’t f*king think.
The “tech bros” controlling AI don’t want to destroy us either but they’re not against if it means $$, they’re indifferent.
And the ad money only keeps flowing harder than it did last quarter if they do destroy us, so it’s a pretty easy choice to destroy society for an easy buck.
of course this is a simplified version of real life that doesn’t take foreign influence and stuff like that into account.
This article attempts to bite off a lot! I'm going to condense it down to one small part.
The Dark Forest experience that's causing "mass migrations" on the Internet is that, if you venture out into social media carelessly, you're entering an aggressive and frequently unpleasant space which is close to the opposite of "fun" for the average person. Here follows a laundry list here of things which you might expect to encounter in an unpleasant online space, most of which have a kind of tabloid quality: scams, nonstop sales pitches, porn, extreme violence, celebrity worship, ideological extremism, racism, sexism, etc. And more (that list is not exhaustive).
So people find that signing up for the average generic platform that welcomes everybody is a bad experience, and migrate to more niche ones. That's been the path I've followed too, all the way here.
It's not more general, it's more specific. Berserker hypothesis is basically grey goo that goes interstellar. The Dark Forest is about how lack of trust, unpredictable technological jumps, and speed of light being dog slow, force civilizations to preemptively destroy any other civilization they spot, while themselves trying to not get discovered.
Berserker event is effectively an implementation detail of one of possible events in the Dark Forest.
I disagree. I think the conditions to get a game theory style setup going are quite specific. Always "defecting" against everything (with no warning) and clearing outwards as fast as you can is probably converged upon along many paths, from many starting points, as long as the physics allows it.
Like Wikipedia says, Dark Forest is for people who are limited in tech and resources. Or have a weird sense of ethics, but ask Robin Hanson how long he thinks that would last.
I'm not sure how this article relates to the dark forest hypothesis, or really anything else for that matter—I can't see the thread. Can anyone summarize?
It's based on another article that claims that people mostly interacting in their own social bubble, fueled by algorithms which mostly isolate people further, is akin to making the Internet a dark forest.
Maybe I’m imagining it, but I feel like there’s a shift in gears somewhere between “we need to fix networks” and “the solution is decentralized networks”. Decentralized networks are unfixable and unmoderatable — that’s why people want them. People don’t want to be corralled or have their information consumption managed (not speaking to what’s good here). The author spends so much effort condemning Facebook for not managing the network in Myanmar enough, and then turns around and suggests — unmoderatable decentralized networks without authorities in a position to manage or moderate them?
The article says "The assumption that "Twitter but decentralized" or "Facebook but open-source and federated" will necessarily be good—rather than differently bad—is a weak one."
> I don't think any centrally governed platform at global scale is capable of doing the work, even if they hired the best and sharpest people I know. Even if they put real effort into humanist upstream product design, rather than tossing loose change to trust and safety teams sent in to clean up after the fact.
>
> Local norms matter too much for global governance of the social internet to make sense; the flattening of global diversity to fit the norms and interests of any given American techno-culture—corporate or otherwise—is both a baldly colonial aspiration and one we should scorn for the same reason that we leave the idea of effective, monolithic, planetary-scale government—benevolent or otherwise—to underbaked science fiction. Home rule and genuine resilience both require the existence of many places, many of them at least partially interconnected.
That’s what confused me, given your cited context. It doesn’t sound centralized. Things that are not centralized are decentralized, no?
Decentralization is not itself the solution. Breaking up the control of servers, but still keeping everything as a global network but now with less moderation, is not the suggestion.
The article is arguing for spaces that are more loosely connected but still moderated, probably more moderated.
I was a young child in the 90s, and I barely used the Internet then, but I remember how people talked about it. It was Cyberspace and the Information Superhighway. It looked like blue and purple grids suspended in black space. It wasn't real in the same way a pen was real. It was an alternate reality.
At some point between, say, 2000 and 2012, everyone forgot that. The Web became an extension of the real world. Now, in 2024, the Web seems to have displaced the real world as the locus of public discourse.
> It names an experience of paranoia and anxiety that by the end of the 2010s was widespread among people with meaningful connections between their online personas and their ability to maintain their standard of living.
This kind of thing always struck me as a poor choice. The great thing about maintaining one's anonymity on the Web, or, to be more precise, adopting a collection of alternate identities, is that they can be discarded easily. A faux pas needn't follow you around, and can't follow you to where you make your living.
> The last and most most dangerous weakness of the Dark Internet Forest as a frame is that it positions the broad landscape of connection as something that “we” can simply do without—and without which we will indeed feel better and be more productive.
> On the level of the individual, this is true for certain values of “we”: for people who are, in any sense, established; people who already have the social status they required to succeed in their field; people whose work doesn’t depend on them needing to find (and re-find and re-find) readers or customers; people whose professional and personal networks are already strong enough to catch them if they slip; people with money.
> So what about everyone else? Should people without those forms of access and capital simply forgo all the benefits afforded by access to broad networks?
Through the twentieth century, as aristocracy gave way to meritocracy, people learnt how to climb the greasy pole without access to these broad networks. Social mobility is largely a consequence of the structure of the economy, and not necessarily a consequence of networking. We are often told that, 'It's not what you know, it's who you know,' but maybe the people who found other ways to the top simply aren't as effective at sharing their secrets as the shmoozers.
> This all stops being an individual problem and becomes a collective one when bad products of the social internet get worse, as when platform turmoil and manipulation helps remodel the offline world in the image of the most grotesque parts of the online one.
Conflict is coming. We've reached a point, I think, we're it's inevitable. I don't think it's clear exactly what the ideas underlying the conflict will be, or what factions will contest it, or in what spaces it will be contested, but there is a range to choose from. The winning move in this situation is to keep informed about events, but otherwise to keep one's head down. Don't challenge ideas you find objectionable, but agree in a mostly-disinterested way. Take it from someone with family members who still have the machete scars.
> Through the twentieth century, as aristocracy gave way to meritocracy, people learnt how to climb the greasy pole without access to these broad networks. Social mobility is largely a consequence of the structure of the economy, and not necessarily a consequence of networking. We are often told that, 'It's not what you know, it's who you know,' but maybe the people who found other ways to the top simply aren't as effective at sharing their secrets as the shmoozers.
I feel the "american dream" got that part right. Social mobility works best when you can start working locally to move up. That is, very low barrier to entrepreneurship. "Who you know" stops being a problem then, everyone can work their way into larger and larger networks.
For better or worse, I don't think we can get rid of "who you know" issue, because it's 100% natural. When you start a venture - whether it's a local shop or an Internet company or just remodeling your dog's kennel - you don't go to Global Employee Search Directory and look for potential co-founders; you just do it with a friend. Now, even the largest corporation, when you go all the way up to the top, is still a glorified version of neighbors building a common tool shack. So is almost every subgraph in the corporate ladder, if you zoom in on it.
So the problem, as I see it, is with an economy where most people have to effectively beg strangers for a job - i.e. employees (myself, I am such a person too). In this scenario, "who you know" at the lower levels becomes unfair to the larger whole.
I'm not sure what should be done about it, though.
(This is just some random thought I have, I haven't managed to sort them into a coherent whole just yet, sorry.)
You could take a screenshot, but not a photo, you couldn't have a real photo inside the computer without a scanner.
You could plug into the phone line if you had dial-up, but you didn't make calls over the Internet. If you did call someone, you had to both install Skype or something.
You could "watch TV" on the computer if you used a cable tuner, but there wasn't TV online.
Reality stayed in reality, and although the Internet has always supervened on reality, the Internet stayed inside the Internet.
Somewhere around "computer phone times" this stopped being the case.
Now politics happens on Twitter, you can order a pizza online and it's not a credit card scam, it actually arrives. You can place a call and with the right aeons it may even connect to a POTS telephone.
At some point it shifted from "The Internet is where a bunch of nerds who like The Internet talk about The Internet" to "The Internet is plugged into real life and is part of real life" to even "Real life is part of the Internet"
That’s true, but these terms show you that the internet was widely understood to be a different place than the “real world”, a distinction that has mostly vanished today.
Real talk. The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology] enables them to manipulated into building systems which reproduce and reinforce social structures and social relations in ways that they would otherwise object to.
To the degree that we've collectively built a dark forest, it's been in part due to this lack of multi-disciplinarianism.
Humans are amazingly adept at rationalization.
It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance, largely due to exponentially better and cheaper compute, as well as tools for distributed collaboration.
But depressingly few of my peers seem to be true general "artisan scientists" as I see it, understanding engineering to be not only a job but a craft, a discipline, an art form, a power and a responsibility.
So much is possible today. Individuals in developed countries, and even many in underdeveloped countries with access to tech, have more velocity at their fingertips than almost any individual in history.
We've built critical systems which rapidly create value with the slightest gesture. But few really take the time to sit down and connect enough dots to see enough of a bigger picture to make meaningful and considerate modifications to the status quo. Few push back against what they're told, few take the time to deeply appreciate even a fraction of the complex systems which create modern society.
We have to do better about educating ourselves, our peers, and our offspring. We need to encourage generalists, facilitate access to multi-disciplinarian education, and hold ourselves and others to higher ethical standards which are themselves informed by a broad perspective.
This certainly comes at the cost of one's personal time. However, I think a majority of us are overentertained and could be better about conditioning ourselves to routinely seek out and learn new things.
> It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance
I'm sorry to rebutt your very first assertion but we had been in a cultural and scientific Renaissance and the last 15 years have been the slow unwinding of that. We got lucky that the internet explosion overlapped with the tail end of publicly supported cultural and scientific production.
I hung out with physics majors in college, all of them smarter than us compsci chuds, and uniformly they are absolutely struggling to survive as post docs or in industry. One of my college buddies has worked at nasa for 4 different firms and has had to move to Texas, Kansas, and Maryland for these gigs and has once again landed on a project where the funding got cut and is looking for a new job. Another works in nano scale semiconducting and had to move to Finland to get project funding from the EU since the US has made basic research funding so scarce. And after several post doc roles he is leaving the field after his last grant wasn't renewed, with not an ounce of negative feedback. Just, sorry we don't have any money anymore. He's now going to go into failure analysis for a mobile phone manufacturer to pay the bills.
The woes of cultural production have also been well documented.
We are in a cultural and scientific collapse
But there's so much money in academia. Where's it going?
Universities charge stupid amounts (50%+) of overhead to researchers. The PIs basically run a lab, hustle for the funding writing grant proposals, and uni takes a big fat cut of whatever funding gets pulled in. And that overhead all gets spent on useless administration, buildings and facilities, investments, and basically anything other than the research the grant was for.
https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/25910/what-does...
The problem is that there's so little money in academia. In the US, state support for public universities has plummeted in the 21st century. In the last state I lived in, the state university near me went from providing over 75% of teaching costs to under 25% in less than 20 years. Tuitions have risen, but it's important to understand the sticker prices are usually discounted with financial aid. If a university raises tuitions by an amount x, they are usually brining in less than 1/2 x new funding. Ironically, reducing university funding leads universities hire more administrators, as they attempt to replace lost funding with donations or indirect costs.
Scarcity and the relentless competitive zero-sum slugfest of living makes everything a cost-benefit calculation: I have a limited number of waking hours and most of them are dedicated to battling it out for resources so I and my family can live. You can put your time into Enterprise, Entertainment, or Enlightenment, but anyone who does anything other than 100% Enterprise is losing out to those who do.
I would love to choose to be an artisan, a craftsman, a changer of the world, a multi-discipline Renaissance Man, (or just an over-entertained couch potato) but I need to make my mortgage payment next month.
Jay Z had a section in decoded where he talked about how his needs as a young man getting into drug dealing quickly and seamlessly switched from food to new clothes to a Lexus - how what started as something he needed to do because they needed money for food became a pursuit of wealth and status almost without him noticing. I don't know your financial or family situation, so don't take this as a critique of you personally, but I think that happens to a lot of people - we don't recognize when the things we're treating as our material needs have moved well beyond where we'd consider trading off for things like meaningful work or a life aligned with our personal values.
I agree, and I didn't mean to make it seem like it was easy. The system is purposefully stacked against us such that the amount of creative, highly-agentic minds are kept to a minimum in order to maintain the status quo.
For the most part, our station in life is something we constantly wage war against from the moment of birth. Coming from a very poor and abusive background, I was homeless by 16 and left with a choice of fully committing to boring technical work, or taking advantage of already being at rock bottom and surgically improving my skills over years until I've become as well-rounded as I would like. It's a lifelong journey, though.
I do wish you luck and I hope you do find time to accomplish some of your desires. You will definitely have to create time and space for it though, free time likely won't magically appear within your current routine.
Go take improv classes. It's a lot of fun and now you have a skill that let you perform in any major metropolitan area without needing a script or much preparation, other than warmups if that's what they do.
But yeah, people should be curious and willing to try things, even things that doesn't seem to be the thing for them.
I'll pile onto that. I love improv. It gave me a new set of mental skills that are difficult to train for elsewhere. It teaches you how to walk in a room and make the best of any situation and overcome that feeling of meeting strangers. I find any difficult work situation I can now approach from a "what can we do with this?" mentality, where I used to always dread rolling up my sleeves to do more work. Highly recommended to anyone, but especially anyone in a leadership role.
what should we build?
When I was an infant taking my first couple years of EE I joined right in with everyone else ridiculing the "basket weavers".
Now I say that stem is just a tool that does no good by itself. It's just as harmful as beneficial. An engineer doesn't like to think of themself as a tool, but tough shit. Without the humanities an engineer is exactly that, merely a tool that others wield, and others decide how to wield and to what ends.
Stem tells you how to build a bridge or a bomb. The humanities tells you whether/when/why to build a bridge or a bomb.
It also made us worser engineers unable to contemplate the computer in front of the computer . We cyclical reinvent the wheels and our brightest regularly bump into the limitations of self projecting themselves upon everyone they meet.
We need a field that is able to systematically cartograph the limitations our brains impose on us, society and technology. We need a world map of blindspots, of disabilities l. Not 15 years ago we congratulated ourselves on plans to degrowth , and look at what happened during the pandemic.
> The disdain engineers have toward the "soft sciences"[sociology, psychology]
While I agree that disdain is not the right reaction, neither is misdescribing what these disciplines are. And the most important fact about them is: they are not sciences.
We do not have a science of how people work, how groups of people work, how collective action works. Dealing with people is an art. It requires applying non-repeatable human judgments to non-repeatable human situations, and doing so constantly, day after day, year after year, realizing that there is never going to be a stable state of things, there is never going to be a time when you have dealt with all the conflicts and solved all the problems and can sit back and relax.
Engineers are understandably uncomfortable with such a situation because it goes against everything we (I say "we" because I'm an engineer myself) are taught. We are taught to engineer solutions to problems, solutions that keep working, if not forever, at least for a long enough time that we aren't constantly having to manage them. A well built bridge does not require constant engineer attention once it is finished.
But there is no such thing when it comes to humans and human relationships. They do require constant attention in order to survive and flourish. But we have no science of how to do that, the way we have a science of how to build bridges. All we have is our fallible human judgment, and if we're lucky, some rules of thumb that, while they aren't science, are hopefully better than nothing. Unfortunately, I think what rules of thumb we have have been mostly ignored in the process of building systems like social media.
Sociology - despite being a science - isn't required to be one in order to fulfill the objective we're discussing. It simply has to be capable of teaching people to identify things they take for granted [being universally true] to in fact be a consequence of their society.
To that degree, studying enough sociology to be able to make the statement, "Compartmentalization and hierarchy of academic subjects contributes to software engineers being unwitting used to replicate social structures," is not dependent on sociology being a science. It is true without relying on an arbitrary epistemology.
The main problem isn't that it isn't a science, but that to the extent that science is used in sociology, it's mostly badly done.
Findings don't replicate, data is used to tell lies, policy built on scientific findings is mostly unrelated to the findings, focus is primarily guided by culture instead of discovery or curiosity. I read a lot of sociology, and the general level of critical thinking and concern for the truth in journal articles is much lower than biology, engineering, or even economics.
We absolutely have statistical and theoretical frameworks for evaluating collective behavior.
Cite something or don't @ me.
> We absolutely have statistical and theoretical frameworks for evaluating collective behavior.
Yes, we do, but their predictive power, if it exists at all, is very poor. Science is about building models with good predictive power. If you don't have that, you don't have a science, at least not in any way that matters.
That's not only what science is about.
And there are social science hypotheses that can predict outcomes.
You don't seem to understand the difference between sociology and socialising, nor the difference between science and engineering.
Hamilton (the founding father) considered political science a science, and explicitly argues in the federalist papers how it has the equivalent of axioms that one can build and reason from
How well have the predictions made by reasoning from those axioms worked out?
It's true that the most egregiously wrong prediction in the Federalist papers, that the US would not have political parties because it was too large, was the work of Madison, not Hamilton. But AFAIK none of Hamilton's predictions turned out very well either.
Soft "sciences" don't have enough predictive power to, on expectation, improve this situation to any meaningful degree
These “soft sciences” have actually been responsible for 100s of millions of deaths in the 20th century.
Many times these practitioners of these ”soft sciences” are cloistered away in the ivory towers of academia and away from regular people whom they actually look down on because they don’t match their theories.
I was thinking that "disdain" might be overdramatic and too broad of a generalization - until I read the replies to this comment.
Lol, I would have guessed you've been here long enough to experience it. :) It's probably not most folks, but when the topics of sociology and psychology come up there's definitely a contingent who reply with contempt.
This isn't a new concept, but the compartmentalization of subjects in school is one of the factors at play along with a hierarchy of subjects and students. You can observe how a lot of computer science folks hold mathematics and physics in high regard, and biologists, and sociologists in low regard. It's no coincidence that this maps to relative possession of the habitus valued by the ideological hegemony.
Again, it works to reinforce social statuses rather than dismantle them, often in ways that are detrimental to those actively, albeit unknowingly, contributing to the same systems.
I'm confused about what you guys keep getting at here when you say vague stuff like "reinforcing social statuses". I hope it's not what I think it is.
My issues with the "soft" sciences, is chiefly their inability to replicate findings, and the paradoxical authority these so called scientists seem to gain despite not actually following the scientific method. It doesn't have to be this way either.
I'm not saying everything in these fields are total bunk or anything but I've been deceived by them enough by now that they have lost my trust. I'm sure there are plenty that actually do good science but I'm not capable of telling them apart from the rest unfortunately.
Even more concerning is this pretentious attitude reminiscent of what I'd expect from a religion or political movement than a field of science. Are we starting to treat universitys like cathedrals now? A scary thought.
The contempt is probably not the topic but the lack of empathy in the descriptions and language in the topic.
Qualitative precision matters. HN crowd presumably loves true social network academics.
Dark forest Vs real could probably be described by networks.
Also Social Media Networks are conversational markets, run by market makers with different kinds of incentives. I do not recall seeing descriptions like this but it would bring real empathy to the space to merely describe things like this.
Broadcast all is NOT the norm in price discovery. Why is it the starting point in social networks? We are brainwashed.
The degree to which a science is valuable is proportional to the degree to which it would keep working if we finally wiped out humans and the goddamned whining stopped. Physics wouldn't notice, sociology would become irrelevant.
“Valuable” only makes any sense when qualified with to whom, and your claim is clearly not true with any human or set of humans in that role.
So all of medicine isn’t science? What a weird take
Valuable for whom?
No rational being left then.
This is an interesting point, but how do you this psychology as a field has or usefully could push against such forces? Is that its role even accidentally?
Another way of saying this is: everything non-trivial you build embeds at least a little bit of cultural baggage.
If you’re not thinking about that it just means you have no idea what stuff you are loading into your designs. It’s still there you’re just not aware of it. It’s like being the unwitting carrier of a disease or a parasite.
Makes me think of brain slugs in Futurama for some reason.
I thought it was for the money
It would help if those "soft sciences" had any sort of reproducible outcomes. As far as I can tell every instance of these "soft sciences" are just an arm of the geopolitical body/state that backs them...with the sole purpose of rationalizing what ever that states status quo is.
Can you give an example? It seems like you have a lot to share but stopped short at a vague implication of a shadowy elite controlling entire academic subjects.
Priming for starters https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-...
The best source of information about the reliability of scientific information...are within the scientific community.
If you engage outside the scientific community, you're most likely going to encounter cranks.
Economics, and the Powell Memo, followed by Milton Friedman and the Phillips curve and trickle down and Reaganomics, to start with.
> […] and trickle down and Reaganomics, to start with.
Ideas that were not taken seriously even by the people who put them forward:
> Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 campaign for the presidency on a platform advocating for supply-side economics. During the 1980 Republican Party presidential primaries, George H. W. Bush had derided Reagan's economic approach as "voodoo economics".[23][24] Following Reagan's election, the "trickle-down" reached wide circulation with the publication of "The Education of David Stockman" a December 1981 interview of Reagan's incoming Office of Management and Budget director David Stockman, in the magazine Atlantic Monthly. In the interview, Stockman expressed doubts about supply side economics, telling journalist William Greider that the Kemp–Roth Tax Cut was a way to rebrand a tax cut for the top income bracket to make it easier to pass into law.[25] Stockman said that "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,' so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."[25][26][27]
> Political opponents of the Reagan administration soon seized on this language in an effort to brand the administration as caring only about the wealthy.[28] In 1982, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote the "trickle-down economics" that David Stockman was referring to was previously known under the name "horse-and-sparrow theory", the idea that feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat.[29] Reagan administration officials including Michael Deaver wanted Stockman to be fired in response to his comments, but he was ultimately kept on in exchange for a private apology.[30]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Reagan_...
See also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_experiment
It'd be like saying traffic engineering and urban design are bullshit because politicians keeps building highways—when traffic engineers know this won't solve the issue of traffic:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs–Thomson_paradox
Also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15-minute_city#Conspiracy_theo...
Just because quack ideas attributed to a particular field are used to justify certain ideological ideas or policies does not mean the field itself is devoid of valid models.
[dead]
There's more to knowledge than just reproducible outcomes.
For example, history is frustrating because you are going to end up in unique circumstances and you're not going to be able to see into the future, only the present. Yet, we must at least have an understanding of the world around us and critical thinking skills that can only come from with doing history.
Are you really saying that psychology doesn’t have “any sort of reproducible outcomes,” or are you not including that one in your definition of “soft sciences?” The comment you’re replying to explicitly did, but I want to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Because Skinner boxes exist. There are entire multi-billion dollar industries built around them (casinos, gacha games/loot boxes), just to pick a super low-hanging-fruit example.
To reinforce your point with another example: If psychology wasn't reproducible then ads wouldn't work. Of course they are reproducible. It's trivial.
some is reproducible.
And very little of psychology covers what is used in ads.
How aware of them do you consider yourself to be? There's an entire field of literature called critical theory that's explicitly dedicated to challenging the status quo. My own field (anthropology/archeology) does it so commonly that there are multiple terms for slightly different shades of it (public, applied, postcolonial, etc).
> As far as I can tell every instance of these "soft sciences" are just an arm of the geopolitical body/state that backs them...with the sole purpose of rationalizing what ever that states status quo is.
This is 100% a sociological take though. Ie: it is in part doing sociology. Perhaps without knowing it, you've arrived at an Althusserian perspective on structuralism through the lens of conflict theory.
Do you suppose that these institutions be systematically studied and can we build models of how they work to reproduce the status quo?
Ignorance is really not a virtue.
If you suspect that you're being lied to by the consensus, feel free to read alternatives by heterodox scholars. I suspected that they're crank.
It's not like I particularly agree with the way things work now, only that we shouldn't make things worse by making obviously stupid moves in the wrong direction.
Thanks for providing a case in point.
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(I don't think the GP comment was very good either, but taking the thread flameward is definitely not what we want.)
How do you think one leads to the other?
Engineers due tend to be pretty critical of things that can’t be accurately and consistently measured (not meant as a slight. It’s true, but it doesn’t make those soft sciences worthless), but they aren’t the only ones making these systems.
Most of the time, engineers are given requirements and build systems to satisfy them.
You wouldn’t blame a construction worker for gentrification, right?
It seems to me that these soft sciences are parasitic and only try to follow successful things created by engineers and impose their vision upon them.
There are plenty of engineers for hire, and sociologists can build their own vision.
Culture and society are downstream of economics, which is downstream (though in feedback with) of technology.
https://xkcd.com/435/
They always keep on asserting that 'multi-disciplinarianism' (always in the form of the less practical being pushed on the more practical, never the other way around despite the obvious role in understanding reality in well, understanding reality). They never worry about being detached from reality from their distance to the objective. It reeks of the bad old days of classical philosophy where they considered estrangement from reality an intrinsic virtue as "purity of thought" and looked down upon those who dealt with banal reality.
I have yet to see any actual backing for such claims. Only standard academia's toxic social knife-fighting and Kafka-traps. The specific form of bullshit being mounting social pressure as a weapon. Where where not agreeing with them and their theories means clearly you are more wrong and a worse person for not agreeing with them and thus you must agree with them!
It always rung of a scam to justify mandatory electives to justify the existence of their professorships. There is no intellectual honesty to be found here, only snobbery and blind adherence to cliches.
AI, bots, and the constant need to fuel training, turns the internet forest into a place where anything a person publishes will be vampirically consumed, mimicked to see whether it can replicate whatever value could be had, and capitalized on if possible or ignored if not.
It’s an interesting contrast to actual dark forest theory—-AI doesn’t want to destroy us, so we don’t need to hide for existential sake. But imagine walking outside and as soon as you do, innumerable copies of you spring up, and each action and sound you make is replicated and amplified. Like a weird Phantom Tollbooth meets Alice in Wonderland on DMT
> AI, bots, and the constant need to fuel training, turns the internet forest into a place where anything a person publishes will be vampirically consumed, mimicked to see whether it can replicate whatever value could be had, and capitalized on if possible or ignored if not.
That's honestly not a problem, unless someone believes they're entitled to 100% of value generated by their interactions with the world - but that's a level of greed way beyond Scrooge McDuck, and the kind of thinking that defines the dreaded "late stage capitalism".
It really is an option to publish something and not care about knowing exactly who read it, and what they're doing with it.
Why do you think that business value is the only thing to look at here? If someone starts copying my likeness, mannerisms, writing style, etc. they could also use that to damage my reputation or harm my relations with other people. I think that those two possibilities represent irreparable harms with no associated business value.
> If someone starts copying my likeness, mannerisms, writing style, etc. they could also use that to damage my reputation or harm my relations with other people. I think that those two possibilities represent irreparable harms with no associated business value.
There's 8 billion people on the planet. Unless you're a celebrity, this is not a real problem for you at this point (and if you are, it's a business problem).
There's no way for a large model learning on the entirety of the Internet to somehow convert "copying likeness, mannerisms, writing style, etc." into damaging your reputation; doing that is something hyper-targeted, and at this point (and in conceivable future), there's no middle ground between "plausible deniability" and "someone targeting you specifically, which they could do just as well in pre-AI times".
You're also not as unique as you think. There are many people with same mannerism, many people with same writing style, etc. Nor are those things constant over time.
The flip side of not being a unique snowflake is also that anyone's contributions to the public Internet are, for purposes of AI training, worth approximately $0 on the margin, and impact the model just as much. It's in the volume of data that the patterns emerge that LLMs learn, volume too big for any person to be entitled to a meaningful part of it.
You could also make the same argument about check forgery or wire fraud. "If someone passes a bad check in your name it's not a big deal because you're only one of 8 billion." However when it happens to you, specifically, it's a big deal because you have to fight the bank and the merchant over it.
"You're not special" is a bad argument for why someone impersonating you isn't a problem. I mean even Black Mirror explained why impersonation is a problem in the very first episode many years ago. You don't even have to be a celebrity, you only have to be in someone else's way.
> You could also make the same argument about check forgery or wire fraud.
You couldn't, because unlike all the things we discussed about AI, those are actually harming the victim in real, direct terms.
Having some model who doesn't know or care about you talking just like you, without claiming it's actually you, to a bunch of people who don't know or care you exist? That's zero actual damage to you.
> "You're not special" is a bad argument for why someone impersonating you isn't a problem. I mean even Black Mirror explained why impersonation is a problem in the very first episode many years ago.
I remember that episode. However, my argument isn't "you're not special, therefore impersonating you isn't a problem" - it's "you're not special, so what you think is impersonating you probably isn't, and even if, it doesn't hurt you in real terms", combined with "anything that's actual impersonation and/or hurts you directly was already possible, and AI currently doesn't impact this at all". Someone wants to screw with you? You're being targeted. AI might make the attacker's job a bit easier, but it's still someone going through the effort, vs. a background process on the Internet everyone seems to think LLMs are.
Also: there's an inverse relationship between weight of accusations and social proximity. A specific person you know (and other people know you know) accusing you of something? It's a problem. Some random comments from random accounts, accusing you and 100 different people of something? Most people won't believe it.
(Except when it's about child abuse. People are extremely sensitive to this - just bringing up the term and a name in the same sentence can ruin the victim's life.)
[dead]
> It really is an option to publish something and not care about knowing exactly who read it, and what they're doing with it.
In a world with UBI (or in a world where creators are aristocracy who don’t have to worry about money) I would agree. In a world of precarity, obviously many people are going to desire to limit reuse of their creations unless they get rewarded for it somehow.
Except all those people performatively declaring their refusal to comment on forums and write blog posts, they're not actually making their money this way. LLMs take away nothing from them, except maybe inflated sense of uniqueness.
I can understand why all kinds of artists, who make money from their creative work, have an issue with generative models. But I feel this is unavoidable - graphics and writing and video creation will follow the same path music already did decades above. For a long time now, bands and singers don't make their living through their songs and recordings. They make it through live performances and branded merch, and related things. Music is too cheap to meter, but human connection isn't, which is why musicians make money by being entertainers. This is the fate that awaits other creative arts too.
The artists who don't mind not making money from their work itself, have built a personal brand to obtain other sources of income. But the future that the OP describes, and which feels quite believable, is one where AI defeats humans even at building a monetized brand around obtained content, so there isn't anything left for humans. I am much less optimistic than you that people will demand human connection, I think they will be satisfied with a convincing enough simulacrum.
It's the same reason why you can't use pictures of people in public or their quotes or tweets for commercial reasons without permission: there's a general concept of human dignity and privacy that includes people's thoughts, words, and appearances/etc as belonging to them. It's not greedy to want respect for basic human autonomy.
Plus pragmatically speaking this sounds suspiciously like something that's "not a problem" until it is a problem. If a poorly written LLM regurgitates my name and lines from a blog post (or god forbid hallucinates a blog post by me as a citation) in some defense of Pol Pot or something that's going to be come a problem for me very quickly.
EDIT: Fridge thought: quite frankly if someone's making money off my interactions in this economy you can bet your last dollar I want my fair share of it. It's not greedy to gain value from your interactions with the world: you already do by interacting since that's a bi-lateral relationship ie it affects each party equally. It IS greedy for a third party who did not participate in the interaction to expect value from it.
It is not about being entitled to 100% of all the value.
It is about the right to have my own value not diluted.
It is not about caring to know who read each one of my words.
It is about the fact that people can later say „xyz wrote that” instead of „oh well another AI generated crap comment” when in reality it was someone’s original thought.
It is not capitalism, but basic respect for other human being.
"There are no fully original thoughts, everything is a remix." -- Socrates, ~370 BC.
"We attribute a thought to a person through a chain of custody. Without it, the thought could be attributed to anyone, or to a generative language model. Not that it matters anyway." -- Abraham Lincoln, ~1862.
I mean, AI truly doesn’t want to destroy us, it can’t f*king think.
The “tech bros” controlling AI don’t want to destroy us either but they’re not against if it means $$, they’re indifferent.
And the ad money only keeps flowing harder than it did last quarter if they do destroy us, so it’s a pretty easy choice to destroy society for an easy buck.
of course this is a simplified version of real life that doesn’t take foreign influence and stuff like that into account.
This article attempts to bite off a lot! I'm going to condense it down to one small part.
The Dark Forest experience that's causing "mass migrations" on the Internet is that, if you venture out into social media carelessly, you're entering an aggressive and frequently unpleasant space which is close to the opposite of "fun" for the average person. Here follows a laundry list here of things which you might expect to encounter in an unpleasant online space, most of which have a kind of tabloid quality: scams, nonstop sales pitches, porn, extreme violence, celebrity worship, ideological extremism, racism, sexism, etc. And more (that list is not exhaustive).
So people find that signing up for the average generic platform that welcomes everybody is a bad experience, and migrate to more niche ones. That's been the path I've followed too, all the way here.
The dark forest hypothesis sort of existed before Liu Cixin.
In a more general form too, and one that I think might be more realistic (depending on the ultimate limits of technology):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserker_hypothesis
It's not more general, it's more specific. Berserker hypothesis is basically grey goo that goes interstellar. The Dark Forest is about how lack of trust, unpredictable technological jumps, and speed of light being dog slow, force civilizations to preemptively destroy any other civilization they spot, while themselves trying to not get discovered.
Berserker event is effectively an implementation detail of one of possible events in the Dark Forest.
I disagree. I think the conditions to get a game theory style setup going are quite specific. Always "defecting" against everything (with no warning) and clearing outwards as fast as you can is probably converged upon along many paths, from many starting points, as long as the physics allows it.
Like Wikipedia says, Dark Forest is for people who are limited in tech and resources. Or have a weird sense of ethics, but ask Robin Hanson how long he thinks that would last.
I'm not sure how this article relates to the dark forest hypothesis, or really anything else for that matter—I can't see the thread. Can anyone summarize?
It doesn't relate to it very much.
It's based on another article that claims that people mostly interacting in their own social bubble, fueled by algorithms which mostly isolate people further, is akin to making the Internet a dark forest.
[flagged]
Maybe I’m imagining it, but I feel like there’s a shift in gears somewhere between “we need to fix networks” and “the solution is decentralized networks”. Decentralized networks are unfixable and unmoderatable — that’s why people want them. People don’t want to be corralled or have their information consumption managed (not speaking to what’s good here). The author spends so much effort condemning Facebook for not managing the network in Myanmar enough, and then turns around and suggests — unmoderatable decentralized networks without authorities in a position to manage or moderate them?
I think I must be confused.
The article says "The assumption that "Twitter but decentralized" or "Facebook but open-source and federated" will necessarily be good—rather than differently bad—is a weak one."
So yes I think you're confused.
It also says:
> I don't think any centrally governed platform at global scale is capable of doing the work, even if they hired the best and sharpest people I know. Even if they put real effort into humanist upstream product design, rather than tossing loose change to trust and safety teams sent in to clean up after the fact.
>
> Local norms matter too much for global governance of the social internet to make sense; the flattening of global diversity to fit the norms and interests of any given American techno-culture—corporate or otherwise—is both a baldly colonial aspiration and one we should scorn for the same reason that we leave the idea of effective, monolithic, planetary-scale government—benevolent or otherwise—to underbaked science fiction. Home rule and genuine resilience both require the existence of many places, many of them at least partially interconnected.
That’s what confused me, given your cited context. It doesn’t sound centralized. Things that are not centralized are decentralized, no?
Decentralization is not itself the solution. Breaking up the control of servers, but still keeping everything as a global network but now with less moderation, is not the suggestion.
The article is arguing for spaces that are more loosely connected but still moderated, probably more moderated.
I was a young child in the 90s, and I barely used the Internet then, but I remember how people talked about it. It was Cyberspace and the Information Superhighway. It looked like blue and purple grids suspended in black space. It wasn't real in the same way a pen was real. It was an alternate reality.
At some point between, say, 2000 and 2012, everyone forgot that. The Web became an extension of the real world. Now, in 2024, the Web seems to have displaced the real world as the locus of public discourse.
> It names an experience of paranoia and anxiety that by the end of the 2010s was widespread among people with meaningful connections between their online personas and their ability to maintain their standard of living.
This kind of thing always struck me as a poor choice. The great thing about maintaining one's anonymity on the Web, or, to be more precise, adopting a collection of alternate identities, is that they can be discarded easily. A faux pas needn't follow you around, and can't follow you to where you make your living.
> The last and most most dangerous weakness of the Dark Internet Forest as a frame is that it positions the broad landscape of connection as something that “we” can simply do without—and without which we will indeed feel better and be more productive.
> On the level of the individual, this is true for certain values of “we”: for people who are, in any sense, established; people who already have the social status they required to succeed in their field; people whose work doesn’t depend on them needing to find (and re-find and re-find) readers or customers; people whose professional and personal networks are already strong enough to catch them if they slip; people with money.
> So what about everyone else? Should people without those forms of access and capital simply forgo all the benefits afforded by access to broad networks?
Through the twentieth century, as aristocracy gave way to meritocracy, people learnt how to climb the greasy pole without access to these broad networks. Social mobility is largely a consequence of the structure of the economy, and not necessarily a consequence of networking. We are often told that, 'It's not what you know, it's who you know,' but maybe the people who found other ways to the top simply aren't as effective at sharing their secrets as the shmoozers.
> This all stops being an individual problem and becomes a collective one when bad products of the social internet get worse, as when platform turmoil and manipulation helps remodel the offline world in the image of the most grotesque parts of the online one.
Conflict is coming. We've reached a point, I think, we're it's inevitable. I don't think it's clear exactly what the ideas underlying the conflict will be, or what factions will contest it, or in what spaces it will be contested, but there is a range to choose from. The winning move in this situation is to keep informed about events, but otherwise to keep one's head down. Don't challenge ideas you find objectionable, but agree in a mostly-disinterested way. Take it from someone with family members who still have the machete scars.
> Through the twentieth century, as aristocracy gave way to meritocracy, people learnt how to climb the greasy pole without access to these broad networks. Social mobility is largely a consequence of the structure of the economy, and not necessarily a consequence of networking. We are often told that, 'It's not what you know, it's who you know,' but maybe the people who found other ways to the top simply aren't as effective at sharing their secrets as the shmoozers.
I feel the "american dream" got that part right. Social mobility works best when you can start working locally to move up. That is, very low barrier to entrepreneurship. "Who you know" stops being a problem then, everyone can work their way into larger and larger networks.
For better or worse, I don't think we can get rid of "who you know" issue, because it's 100% natural. When you start a venture - whether it's a local shop or an Internet company or just remodeling your dog's kennel - you don't go to Global Employee Search Directory and look for potential co-founders; you just do it with a friend. Now, even the largest corporation, when you go all the way up to the top, is still a glorified version of neighbors building a common tool shack. So is almost every subgraph in the corporate ladder, if you zoom in on it.
So the problem, as I see it, is with an economy where most people have to effectively beg strangers for a job - i.e. employees (myself, I am such a person too). In this scenario, "who you know" at the lower levels becomes unfair to the larger whole.
I'm not sure what should be done about it, though.
(This is just some random thought I have, I haven't managed to sort them into a coherent whole just yet, sorry.)
> At some point between, say, 2000 and 2012, everyone forgot that.
September.
I remember when the Internet wasn't real.
You could take a screenshot, but not a photo, you couldn't have a real photo inside the computer without a scanner.
You could plug into the phone line if you had dial-up, but you didn't make calls over the Internet. If you did call someone, you had to both install Skype or something.
You could "watch TV" on the computer if you used a cable tuner, but there wasn't TV online.
Reality stayed in reality, and although the Internet has always supervened on reality, the Internet stayed inside the Internet.
Somewhere around "computer phone times" this stopped being the case.
Now politics happens on Twitter, you can order a pizza online and it's not a credit card scam, it actually arrives. You can place a call and with the right aeons it may even connect to a POTS telephone.
At some point it shifted from "The Internet is where a bunch of nerds who like The Internet talk about The Internet" to "The Internet is plugged into real life and is part of real life" to even "Real life is part of the Internet"
> Reality stayed in reality...
The TV reality. It's pretty peaceful when everyone agrees, even when what they agree upon is false.
YES!
I remember. We took a deep breath and said "here we go again"... ...I finally released that breath, but it hurt. The Dumb! So much dumb....
> It was Cyberspace and the Information Superhighway.
Regular people almost never used those words. Only the media did.
That’s true, but these terms show you that the internet was widely understood to be a different place than the “real world”, a distinction that has mostly vanished today.
Didn't the same thing happen with TV?