(1) But 'natural' doesn't carry any moral weight, right? A beggar on the street is doing his best to be convincing, a kid throwing a tantrum is doing its best to be convincing, a con artist, an actor, the senate majority leader, etc. The moral weight is in the goals.
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(2) I don't think we have a choice. The literal boundaries of the virtual spaces we inhabit are constrained by the companies whose primary business is in leasing out the ability to motivate or constrain our behavior. It's not about 'convincing' people, that's a different layer.
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So what does it mean to make an expression 'as convincing as possible'? The real game is making an expression as effective as possible. If you want to win people to your side, sure, optimize for convincing. If you want to sell a product, optimize for insecurity.
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Tech companies are creating a new science around manipulating human behavior at scale. We know this, right? It's literally their business model. Why don't we ever talk about that? Doesn't that sound like the sort of thing that should be studied? Is it just 'speech'?
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Because the tools that let you optimize for insecurity on behalf of a deodorant company will also let you optimize on behalf of political ideology, religion, voter turnout and anything else anyone wants to buy. It's in the nature of the tools themselves, right?
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That's why I'm not worried about missing out from hearing out antivaxers or watching fox news spew the latest talking points from the murderous hatemongers they serve. After careful consideration I see them as fundamentally optimizing for harm, and that's enough for me.
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Replying to @mykola @generativist
The examples you mentioned sound like separate issues. I don’t think a tech company has any inherent interest in promoting Fox News or does Fox maybe have this new science technology as well? Why would either Fox or tech companies benefit by convincing people to avoid vaccines?
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I see at least three different circumstances here: 1. Commercial entity profiting but neutrally aligned relative to audience 2. Commercial entity profiting and positively aligned with the audience and 3. Audience without a clear commercial entity involved
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Replying to @kareem_carr @mykola
(Gonna come back to this in a bit. long thread and i woke up to an corrupted gpu buffer for like no reason.)
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Replying to @generativist @kareem_carr
This is more nuanced than late-night stoned tweeting can properly articulate. I’ll try to write up a more formal essay. The thesis is about the capabilities inherent to these systems, not about the current intentions of their current owners.
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I 100% agree with that thesis.
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