Mini Post Collection 1 - Sep 2023

Everything rots, How Facebook stole the Gaps, and other thoughts.

I like reading short story collections. They are long enough to get across an interesting idea, but not so long that they waste my time after they have conveyed the key idea.

This post is a collection of “short posts”. Each of these is too short to justify being a post in itself, but also too long for me to want to write it as a “tweet”. That, and if I posted them on Twitter then I’d have to deal with the kind of people who hang out on Twitter.

It’s possible that I might eventually expand some of these to full length blog posts. 

I’m also toying with the idea of using these kinds of “collection posts” posts to share my “edgier opinions”, since mixing that opinion together with other opinions reduces the risk of “hate shares”.

Everything Rots

We sometimes wonder why important things fall apart, whether it’s human bodies being destroyed by aging, social movements succumbing to infighting, or software code bases accumulating cruft. A better question to ask is why do some things last as long as they do.

Everything rots. Everything complex gradually accumulates errors until it falls apart. The question isn’t whether something will rot, but whether it will grow fast enough that it produces something of value before it collapses.

When something lasts a long time, it is usually because it has a core that changes slowly, and that core creates an environment that allows sub-parts to rot individually, and have their place taken by things that haven’t rotted yet. We can see this in the the design of political systems (slow changing constitutions and fast rotting parties), bodies (slow changing DNA and fast-rotting cells), code bases (slow changing core platform, and fast-rotting apps), and economic systems (slow changing rules, and fast-rotting companies).

How Facebook Stole the Gaps

Newspapers used to make lots of money, and now they don’t. Part of the reason is that they lost the classified ads market, but part of the reason is that they lost the gaps between articles to companies like Facebook - who make huge amounts of money.

When I’m reading a print magazine I alternate between two states. To begin with, my goal is to find something interesting to read. When I'm in this state I’m super-valuable to advertisers, because the interesting thing I want to read might be an advert. When I was a teenager reading computer magazines (I’m a nerd) I’d spend as much time reading the ads as the articles, and I bought a ton of things that had been advertised in those ads. The best ads weren’t annoying - they were part of the content.

Once I’ve found something I want to read, I switch into a different state, where my goal is to read a particular piece of content. When I’m in this state I am of very little value to an advertiser, because any advert is just going to get in the way of me reading the article.

The way news sites got stuck is that they gave the gaps to aggregators like Facebook, and the gaps are where the money is.

There is no such thing as Neutral

When I worked at Facebook Integrity, a lot of people cared about us being politically neutral. That is a good goal - because a Facebook that intentionally steered people towards supporting its political allies is deeply creepy.

But to some extent this was impossible. Pretty much any ranking change we made shifted the ideological mix in some way. Maybe conservatives use reshare more than liberals. Maybe libertarians use Android more than Authoritarians. Maybe some races use swear words or video more than others. Maybe some ideological groups are more likely to respond to “go out and vote” messages in their feed than others. Maybe Christians are more likely to use group features than Atheists. Maybe reducing the ranking impact of over-active users reduces the ranking of the ideologies those people hold.

One could argue that the right thing to do is to keep the ideological mix the same as it was before we made the change, but that rules out almost all changes, and who is to say that that mix was the right one.

There is no such thing as neutral. Life would be much simpler if there was, but there isn’t. This doesn’t mean that we should give up on goals of neutrality and just boost whatever ideology aligns with our self interest. But it does mean that we should maybe look for solutions other than neutrality.

Motivated Morality

Most people are familiar with the concept of motivated reasoning. When a person thinks they are using reason to answer a question, their thinking will naturally bias towards getting the answer that aligns with their personal interests..

There is a similar pattern in the way people choose moral frameworks and ideologies to believe. To a large extent, people will choose the ideological system that aligns with their self interest.

If you own slaves, then you’ll choose an ideology that says this is good. If you are a worker, you’ll choose an ideology that reduces the supply of your kind of worker so that you can drive up wages. If you are an employer, you’ll choose an ideology that increases the supply of the kind of worker you employ, so you can drive down wages. Whatever identity group you are part of, you’ll choose an ideology that says your group is good and should rightfully have more power.

It’s important to be aware of this. When you get into a conflict with someone, it’s tempting to believe that you are guided by pure morals, while they are driven by self interest. But most often, you are both driven by what you consider to be pure morals - it’s just that your morals naturally align with your self interest.

I’ve talked to many people that other people think of as evil, from terrorists, to white supremacists, to exploitative capitalist bosses. All of them thought they were the good guys - and had chosen an ethical system in which they were clearly right.

Science isn’t about Scientists

In the past we had priests. Priests were people who read complex books with words normal people didn’t know, and used complex reasoning normal people didn’t understand, and came up with authoritative pronouncements about how everyone should live their lives. Priests were people who were part of a special elite group and you could only become a priest if the other priests let you in. If you disagreed with the priests then it was because you were a fool.

But then science came along and freed us from that. Science told us that the truth didn’t come from special books or deep thought, but from experiment. Science isn’t about what is true, but about what works. Science says that if you want to make progress then you shouldn’t go looking for an expert, but you should try stuff for yourself, see what works, and do more of whatever that was. Science did away with the concept of priests, because anyone can apply the scientific method and create new scientific knowledge.

Nowadays it seems common to talk about science as being something done by scientists. To become a scientist, it isn’t sufficient to be doing Science - you have to join one of the elite universities where scientists hang out and you need to gain the approval of the other scientists. To produce scientific knowledge it isn’t sufficient for that knowledge to come from experiment - you have to have your knowledge peer-reviewed by scientists to make sure it aligns with their thinking, and ideally you need to be a scientist yourself. If you aren’t a scientist you are likely to have trouble even being able to read scientific “publications”.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the world of science is turning into a replica of the priesthood of the past. To a large extent scientists do apply the scientific method. But the world of science is clearly trending in the direction of becoming a priesthood, and that probably isn’t good.

If we want to fix this then we need to start with what we teach. We should teach science not as a collection of knowledge, but as a way of thinking. And maybe we should get rid of the word “scientist” altogether.