dwither

Appreciate these explainers.

Heart leapt into my throat a bit when I saw the headline on Wired this morning, without any context.

Precisely.

It’s not about whether AI is good or bad, it’s about figuring out where it’s good and where it’s bad.

I saw a bunch of questions posed to Noem about whether they were sleeping together, and she repeatedly just accused the questioner of tabloid reporting instead of answering the question.

I presume this is related to that.

Yeah, I think it's inevitable at scale. Like the process is: 1) user see's something that triggers a reaction in them, 2) they react instinctively with a block (as is the culture - 'block early and block often').

Post author cannot manage the trigger reactions of the wider population.

Like, I think they are very useful in this regard, and can save a lot of time and effort, but you still have to have a deep understanding of what you're working with. In a lot of ways you're doing QA work, making sure the 'intern' didn't miss anything important, so to say.

Like, they assign importance based on repetition. And so there may be critical ideas that are salient for people who read it, but because it's only mentioned once, the LLM doesn't understand the importance.

You can adjust this by asking it to focus on 'sleeper insights', but... not consistent.

I've been experimenting with AI, and I'm not sure I think this is entirely correct. How can the LLM know what is the relevant part of what it is shortening for the relevant audience? Very precise prompting may ameliorate this, but easy to make mistakes. And you wont know it when you do.

Yeah, I was concerned about this back when it was implemented. The capacity to end any possibility of interaction forever on often extremely thin bases never sat well with me.

I thought a default setting in which blocks timeout would ameliorate the issue, with friction to extend/make permanent.

yeah absolutely, AI def muddies the waters, but I think if you got the settings right, it'd be more helpful than harmful

getting there is obv the real challenge

The way twitter functioned during covid was incredible. I'd love to be a part of something that recreates that kind of dynamic across a whole bunch of topics, but without the weaknesses.

Roads been rough, but destination remains in sight afaict.

I'm here because I see this as our best hope of creating an epistemic substrate at scale that reflects reality. Which is critically important for the type of civilisation we were aiming to be.

I saw jack announce they were thinking about it on twitter, and when I saw Jay get selected I went and read up on her background and values.

I got my invite as soon as why started handing em out in matrix.

Honestly wonder just how far back the pattern goes. Maybe this is just how a certain subset of humanity operates. It is effective. Learned behaviour.

every accusation is a confession

Make a labeller maybe? If you can create a reliable detection mechanism that people can subscribe to, it would be able to scale.

Love this.

Alright.

I kind of hate to say it, but I think the Will Stancil saga has become important to pay attention to in that it illustrates something that's gone very wrong with the behavior of purported adults using social media

it's really Noticeable how people trust will stancil's account of his discussions with the verge way more than any of the verge's employees. (to be clear, I think this is the correct position)

I think there's real value in this approach. No harm in starting out this way, and adjusting later if needed. Can't do that the other way around.

🧵 People don't have any inkling of how social media (& regular media; all sorts of media) influences their attitudes. But what we see is who we become. (Get off of X!)

In this study, subjects were randomly assigned to view a chronological or algorithmic X feed. Exposure to the latter led users "to

Been following you a long time, and held similar opinions, but haven't been on social much recently.

Where can I get a summary of what's been going on?

those were quite the days, yeah

absolutely

in New Zealand we started giving legal personhood to rivers and other natural features to give a legal basis for acting in their interests

communitylaw.org.nz/community-la...

The biggest challenge here, is figuring out a way to define and ascertain bad faith. There is no measurable part of a post that you can see and go 'ahah, thats bad faith'. There are a bunch of other harder to measure factors involved.

If you solve that, you can solve a LOT of the problems we have.

Engaging in good faith with someone who is acting in bad faith is a recipe to get hurt.

Will is quite correct here.

It's a good time to see them, they have their pups and can be quite playful around now.

Looking forward to your talk at the University of Otago in a few days.

Interesting, that would suggest this could be a filtering mechanism.

Glad to see you raising this. It is the right long term decision, we just have to get there.

this is what i mean about the new liberal internationalism: we, liberals, need to start thinking about what it means to organize liberal-liberal rather than state-state