I agree with you so strongly that I went ahead and updated my comment. The problem is general and out of control. Orwell said it best: “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”

These articles frustrate the shit out of me. They accept both the company’s own framing and its selectively-released data at face value. If you get to pick your own framing and selectively release the data that suits you, you can justify anything.

I am once again begging journalists to be more critical of tech companies.

But as this happens, it’s crucial to keep the denominator in mind. Since 2020, Waymo has reported roughly 60 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag or cause an injury. But those crashes occurred over more than 50 million miles of driverless operations. If you randomly selected 50 million miles of human driving—that’s roughly 70 lifetimes behind the wheel—you would likely see far more serious crashes than Waymo has experienced to date.

[…] Waymo knows exactly how many times its vehicles have crashed. What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash. Waymo has tried to address this by estimating human crash rates in its two biggest markets—Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo’s analysis focused on the 44 million miles Waymo had driven in these cities through December, ignoring its smaller operations in Los Angeles and Austin.

This is the wrong comparison. These are taxis, which means they’re driving taxi miles. They should be compared to taxis, not normal people who drive almost exclusively during their commutes (which is probably the most dangerous time to drive since it’s precisely when they’re all driving).

edit to add: We also need to know how often Waymo intervenes in the supposedly autonomous operations. The latest we have from this, which was leaked a while back, is that Waymo cars are actually less autonomous than taxis, and require >1 employee per car.

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years. We all take debt for granted. It’s fascinating to learn how differently we’ve thought about it over the millenia and how much of our modern world makes more sense when understood through its lens.

Yeah I really couldn’t agree more. I really harped on the importance of other properties of the medium, like brevity, when I reviewed the book #HashtagActivism, and how those too are structurally right wing. There’s a lot of scholars doing these kinds of network studies and imo they way too often emphasize user-user dynamics and de-emphasize, if not totally omit, the fact that all these interactions are heavily mediated. Just this week I watched a talk that I thought had many of these same problems.

Thanks!

I feel enlightened now that you called out the self-reinforcing nature of the algorithms. It makes sense that an RL agent solving the bandits problem would create its own bubbles out of laziness.

You’re totally right that it’s like a multi-armed bandit problem, but maybe with so many possibilities that searching is prohibitively expensive, since the space of options to search is much bigger than the rate that humans can consume content. In other ways, though, there’s a dissimilarity because the agent’s reward depends on its past choices (people watch more of what they’re recommended). It would be really interesting to know if anyone has modeled a multi-armed bandit problem with this kind of self-dependency. I bet that, in that case, the exploration behavior is pretty chaotic. @[email protected] this seems like something you might just know off the top of your head!

Maybe we can take advantage of that laziness to incept critical thinking back into social media, or at least have it eat itself.

If you have any ideas for how to turn social media against itself, I’d love to hear them. I worked on this post unusually long for a lot of reasons, but one of them was trying to think of a counter strategy. I came up with nothing though!

Yup. Silicon-washing genocidal intention is almost certainly the most profitable use of AI we’ve come up with so far.

taps the sign

No problem!

Technology is constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint.

Example: Let’s say that there’s a factory, and the factory has a machine that makes whatever. The machine takes 2 people to operate. The thing needs to get made, so that limits the number of possible designs, but there are still many open questions like, for example, should the workers face each other or face away from each other? The boss might make them face away from each other, that way they don’t chat and get distracted. If the workers get to choose, they’d prefer to face each other to make the work more pleasant. In this way, the values of society are embedded in the design of the machine itself.

I struggle with the idea that a tool (like a computer) is bad because is too general purpose. Society hence the people and their values define how the tool is used. Would you elaborate on that? I’d like to understand the idea.

I love computers! It’s not that they’re bad, but that, because they’re so general purpose, more cultural values get embedded. Like in the example above, there are decisions that aren’t determined by the goals of what you’re trying to accomplish, but because computers are so much more open ended than physical robots, there are more decisions like that, and you have even more leeway in how they’re decided.

I agree with you that good/evil is not a productive way to think about it, just like I don’t think neutrality is right either. Instead, I think that our technology contains within it a reflection of who got to make those many design decisions, like which direction should the workers sit. These decisions accumulate. I personally think that capitalism sucks, so technology under capitalism, after a few hundred years, also sucks, since that technology contains within it hundreds of years of capitalist decision-making.

I didn’t find the article particularly insightful but I don’t like your way of thinking about tech. Technology and society make each other together. Obviously, technology choices like mass transit vs cars shape our lives in ways that the pens example doesn’t help us explain. Similarly, society shapes the way that we make technology. Technology is constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint. The leftover space (i.e. the vast majority) is the process through which we embed social values into the technology. To return to the example of mass transit vs cars, these obviously have different embedded values within them, which then go on to shape the world that we make around them.

This way of thinking helps explain why computer technology specifically is so awful: Computers are shockingly general purpose in a way that has no parallel in physical products. This means that the underconstraining is more pronounced, so social values have an even more outsized say in how they get made. This is why every other software product is just the pure manifestation of capitalism in a way that a robotic arm could never be.

edit to add that this argument is adapted from Andrew Feenberg’s “Transforming Technology”

Yes, and worse, even if they are true to that vision, other bigger players will be offering huge piles of cash to buy the thing. There will always be a perpetual temptation in its current structure. Just look at another beloved Vermont brand, Ben and Jerry’s, now owned by unilever.

No don’t! I’m glad you posted it! I do think that the story of FPF is worth telling because it actually is really useful and pleasant. The internet doesn’t inherently make us into assholes, but companies on the internet design their products to bring out the worst in us.

I live in Vermont. These rosy articles about Front Porch Forum come out every so often, and, as someone who writes about the intersection of tech and capitalism, they frustrate me.

First things first, it’s a moderated mailing list with some ads. I don’t know if it even makes sense to call it a social network, honestly. It’s a great service because moderated mailing lists are great. Here’s the problem:

To maintain this level of moderation, the founder does not want to expand Front Porch Forum beyond Vermont’s borders. He highlighted Nextdoor, another locally-focused social media platform that has expanded internationally, which has often been accused of inflaming tensions within communities due to its more relaxed moderation policy. However, Sabathier believes that local social media similar to Front Porch Forum could work elsewhere in the US, including in less progressive states – Vermont, the home of socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, was the state that cast the fewest votes for Trump in the November 2024 election. “It’s not so much a political platform as a tool for communities to organize themselves and be more cohesive,” said the researcher. “And that would be beneficial everywhere.”

Capitalism makes this world impossible. Front Porch Forum is a private business owned by a guy (technically, it’s a public benefit corporation, but those are toothless designations). Like so many beloved services, it’ll be great until it’s not. Eventually, cofounders, as lovely and well meaning as they might be, leave, move, die, whatever, and someone shitty will end up in control. Without a corporate restructuring into, say, a user cooperative, it is just as doomed as every other internet thing that we’ve all loved. These puff pieces always act like Vermont is a magical place and, frankly, it is, but not like this. We live under capitalism too. Sometimes, due to being a rural, freezing, mountainous backwater, we get short reprieves from the worst of it, but the problem with social media is systemic.

AMA I guess.

I have now read so many “ChatGPT can do X job better than workers” papers, and I don’t think that I’ve ever found one that wasn’t at least flawed if not complete bunk once I went through the actual paper. I wrote about this a year ago, and I’ve since done the occasional follow-up on specific articles, including an official response to one of the most dishonest published papers that I’ve ever read that just itself passed peer review and is awaiting publication.

That academics are still “bench-marking” ChatGPT like this, a full year after I wrote that, is genuinely astounding to me on so many levels. I don’t even have anything left to say about it at this point. At least fewer of them are now purposefully designing their experiments to conclude that AI is awesome, and are coming to the obvious conclusion that ChatGPT cannot actually replace doctors, because of course it can’t.

This is my favorite one of these ChatGPT-as-doctor studies to date. It concluded that “GPT-4 ranked higher than the majority of physicians” on their exams. In reality, it actually can’t do the exam, so the researchers made a special, ChatGPT-friendly version of the exam for the sole purpose of concluding that ChatGPT is better than humans.

Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.

Just a bunch of serious doctors at serious hospitals showing their whole ass.

Happy to be of service!

I don’t know enough about their past to comment on that.

I highly recommend Herman and Chomsky’s book, Manufacturing Consent. It’s about exactly this.

But at least the way I read it, Bennet is saying that the NYT has a duty to help both sides understand each other, and the way to do that would be by giving a voice to the right and centrists without necessarily endorsing any faction

I think that this is a superficially pleasing argument but actually quite dangerous. It ignores that the NYT is itself quite powerful. Anything printed in the NYT is instantly given credibility, so it’s actually impossible for them to stay objective and not take sides. Taking an army out to quash protestors gets normalized when it appears in the NYT, which is a point for that side of the argument, but the NYT can’t publish every side of every issue. There’s not enough space on the whole internet for that. This is why we have that saying that I mentioned in the other comment, that journalists should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, or that journalists ought to speak truth to power. Since it’s simply impractical to be truly neural, in the sense of publishing every side of every issue, a responsible journalist considers the power dynamics to decide which sides need airing.

The author of the OP argues that, because Cotton is already a very influential person, he ought to be published in the NYT, but I think that the exact opposite is true. Because Cotton is already an influential person, he has plenty of places that he can speak, and when the NYT platforms his view that powerful people like him should oppress those beneath them, they do a disservice to their society by implicitly endorsing that as something more worthy of publishing than the infinite other things that they could publish. For literally all of history, it’s been easy to hear the opinions of those who wield violence to suppress dissent. Journalism is special only when it goes against power.

No, we only agree that the NYT sucks, but disagree on basically everything else. We are coming from exact opposite directions. Yes, we both are attacking the NYT, but, like I already explained, the article attacks them for the opposite reason. For example:

Until that miserable Saturday morning I thought I was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with him in a struggle to revive them. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

That is absurd bullshit. Like I said, the NYT’s principles and history are that of collaborating with American elite interests since its founding.

The article talks about “objectivity” over and over, and how the NYT used to strive for it, but that’s simply not true. The author’s concept of objectivity is what Gramsci calls cultural hegemony, in which the worldview of the ruling class becomes accepted as consensus reality. Like I said, the NYT and its ilk once had cultural hegemony, but it’s now been pierced. Another example:

There have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions. The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

Fuck that noise. This author is praising them for being “brave” on questioning trans people, but many activists groups have documented what this actually is: The NYT has an anti-trans editorial stance.

Again, like I said in my first comment, the author doesn’t understand the role of power in journalism: He thinks that the job of the journalist is to present all sides objectively, without any understanding that some people are in power and others are oppressed. Like the famous saying goes, the job of the journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. The NYT’s entire history, with some very notable exceptions, I grant you, is the opposite of that. Its apparent fall from grace now isn’t because it has lots it objectivity, but its hegemony over American information.

I very strongly disagree with almost every word in this article. The work of journalism is to hold power to account, not to publish the dangerous ideas of the already-powerful. Any so-called journalist who thinks that is their job ought to be fired. The NYT didn’t lose its way when it hesitated to publish a call to crush BLM protestors with the army, but when it decided to be the mouthpiece of the American elite, as it has been for most of its history. Remember when it collaborated with the Bush administration to invade Iraq? Manufacturing Consent came out even before that, and it documented decades of NYT editorializing in favor of specific American interests.

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered.

Give me a break. The very people who did the Iraq WMD coverage are still famous and respected journalists, for crying out loud. Some of them are still at the fucking Times.

I agree with the author that the failure of journalism is a major cause of Trump, but in the exact opposite sense: It’s not that the NYT is no longer trying to be objective, but that its veneer of objectivity has become transparently bullshit. The only thing that has changed is that traditional media outlets no longer have a monopoly on what information Americans get. The many other sources that have risen to challenge them are extremely problematic, to say the least, but traditional media outlets created that opening themselves. Like so much MAGA bullshit, the attacks on the media as elite and biased and out of touch land because they are in fact grounded in some truth, though the “solutions” are always a nightmare.

I say this every chance that I get: There is no such thing as a technological revolution. Revolutions happen within human institutions, and technologies change what’s possible within them. It’s great to see a similar argument in such a mainstream magazine.

Dan McQuillan has been warning about this since forever, to the point where I would’ve assumed that he’d be referenced if not interviewed int his article, though he wasn’t. Here’s a pretty short one from him. His basic argument is that AI is best understood as algorithmic Thatcherism, in which they’ll silicon-wash the same austerity politics that neoliberalism has been feeding us forever.