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One of my personal hobbyhorses is that the problem Matt is outlining – use of AI and ML to optimize for people's short-term desires, overriding their longer-term goals and ethics – is exactly how I think a hypothetical AI takeover is going to go. Not Skynet terminating us all, but a soft obliteration of most people's ability to function meaningfully, outside of maximizing whatever engagement metrics were calibrated last before they became too powerful for the average person to resist.

Sure, a few people will complain loudly, but they'll be written off as cranks. And a few people will profit mightily, but hasn't it ever been thus? And the rest of us will drown in customized, optimized, individualized food and entertainment, in between whatever shift work we do that's too expensive to automate.

Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but I view this as a much more likely outcome of failure to align AI than being turned into a paperclip.

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While I agree that for a society as a whole to function optimally the people in it need to feel bound to each other by a common sense of responsibility and community, I'm very skeptical of takes like this that say the solution for regulating a particular industry is for the people in it to be better and more "ethical", rather than trying to write neutral, clear laws and making compliance with them the standard -- or use the old common law approach of building up the legal standard incrementally, case-by-case (which section 230 short-circuited here). Ethical scoldings aren't a realistic substitute from the standpoint of competitive dynamics within the industry, or of overcoming self-justifying, motivated reasoning. People are very good at convincing themselves that what they're doing is right.

As a example, look at the double standard our own host applies to Meta and Twitter. Perhaps even more than Facebook, Twitter is a noxious dump that has damaged and coarsened our public discourse. It rewards shallow, snarky, tribal patterns of thinking and behavior, and exacerbates rather than ameliorates incivility and division, suspicion and distrust rather than extending good faith and the benefit of the doubt. But it's very easy for those who gain the most from Twitter to overlook it's net bad effect and justify it.

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I genuinely feel frustrated that social networking websites have done a ton of good for me as an autistic person at getting me to socialize and leading to events and causes to work for that I literally never would have without them and everyone treats engaging with them as a thing to be avoided.

I’m not saying they are free from problems at all, but my Facebook is full of groups and events for engaging in things recipes and pet and baby pictures by my active use of filters. I’m a bit of an addict but like my pre-Facebook social interaction was basically nothing and that doesn’t seem so bad.

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As an employee (a senior eng on ads) I find I actually agree with this critique. And I do not think Matt will find this convincing, but just want to make the point.

If we didn’t do it, someone else would, sure. But it’s also more complicated than that. This is a larger trend that does not originate with us and we are trying to survive. That trend is what’s interesting.

Matthewmatosis (video game reviewer) once made a point about the convergent evolution of video games, as all get leveling systems and RPG elements and free roaming elements. This is happening as people try to make their products more appealing and borrow popular elements. Sometimes there are paradigm shifts where either consumer preferences change or are revealed, and then other products start evolving along those lines instead.

He makes the analogy that if you went back in time and released DOOM again, but with RPG elements, it would do *better* than DOOM most likely. Even though it would sully the purity of what DOOM was. Even if the developers of DOOM refused, someone else could just come along and make DOOM + RPG elements and profit.

I think that analogy works for social media. They are all evolving towards short form video, and while any one company probably would say it’s bad, *all* of them are doing it. Not just Meta. There is no world where meta saying no results in this not happening.

Think a bit about the history of this. Tiktok is not original. Vine came first, and showed everyone the power of short form video. But then it died for finance/monetization reasons, not because the format lacked appeal, and the surviving competitors in the attention space did not go full short form video (probably for a mix of principle about their original product purpose and bad business sense). IG/FB/Snapchat/YouTube all in theory took steps at the time to compete, but stopped the convergent evolution when Vine went away. Then years later, TikTok emerges to essentially complete the evolution towards people’s revealed preferences. And now here we are.

I do not think this should make Meta blameless or anything, but I do not see a world where we (now the internet using public and not the company) can internet shame the relevant companies into not reacting in the way other companies react to a moneymaking product innovation.

So I’d be curious to know what Matt thinks we *should* do. Stop existing? I am sympathetic. Try to be like Twitter and occupy our non-money making/doomed niche? Perhaps. Because I think social media will convergently evolve to be short form video selected by algorithm, whether meta is involved or not. None of this makes me feel good. But shaming individual players does not solve the revealed preference problem.

(My answer, not that I have sway, is to make it easier for people to *make* and *share* short form video to post/story but not build a whole product around it. And instead lean into more friend specific and ephemerality specific features. Try to emphasis what makes IG unique instead of chasing short form video)

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>One thing I like about being in the subscription newsletter business is I don’t think you can make money doing this on a guilty pleasure basis. Because people need to actually opt in and pay money, it only works if people feel proud to be a Slow Boring subscriber.

Agreed! And I think this also extends to the Slow Boring comment section. I believe the paywall has led to higher quality user comments and more engaging conversations. Since users have to opt in to reading and participating in the Yglesias-verse we get a better form of social media.

Further, I’ve found myself spending far less time on other social media due to having this superior alternative. And that makes me think there could be some potential for a paid social media offering. That might even become a key selling point of many substack subscriptions.

Continuing the publication analogy from the article, Twitter and Facebook could be the low-quality tabloids; a guilty pleasure that many still engage in. Alternatively, the paid social media would be comparable to the higher-quality print publications.

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Aug 29, 2022·edited Aug 29, 2022

Social media was basically invented when I was in college and I remember the sudden impact it had on myself and my peers. I remember the first breakup I went through on social media, it was weird and very uncomfortable. That experience always made me dislike how social media made my private life public, it made it harder to live my life in a non toxic way.

I don’t engage with social media at all now except for business related things. Sometimes it impacts my awareness of certain events but it’s worth it for my mental health, I’ve just been a happier person since I closed all those accounts.

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> When I say that I want to stop eating random snacks, that is my authentic preference — and when I go to a party and see some chips and tell myself “just one won’t hurt,” that is self-deception

I disagree that these stated preferences are more authentic than the revealed ones. I think that incorrectly separates the rational mind from irrational impulses. Instead, I believe the mind is a combination of conscious thinking and subconscious impulses, with the latter including emotions and intuitions. There can commonly be conflicts between the two, but neither is more authentic.

In terms of addressing the conflict, I believe the rational mind can construct a better environment for the subconscious mind to operate into. For example, to consume a healthy diet I don’t keep any snacks nor alcohol in my home to remove these temptations. I also do a fair amount of meal planning to minimize the risk of overeating. As a result, I don’t find much of a conscious/unconscious conflict with regard to diet since the environment in which my subconscious operates doesn’t include these unhealthy temptations.

*edited to add quoted text

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I don't think I've ever disagreed with a Slow Boring piece as comprehensively as I disagree with this one. For one thing, NewsFeed is not the only Facebook product; they also make Facebook Messenger, which is my main communications medium for three close friends. And Facebook has refined their definition of what counts as interesting content before, notably by downgrading sites that people clicked onto and then immediately left – e.g. Upworthy, whose clickbaity headlines I think were the reason Facebook made this change.

But fine. Meta doesn't need me to defend them. I'm mostly worried about the deeper paternalistic implications of the principles set out here. I'm a big fan of revealed preference, for one thing – I think revealed preference is really important when the *government* tries to find out what people want. I certainly wouldn't claim revealed preference is always genuine preference, and if you're just a private actor selling a product, the distinction might matter, but I definitely don't want the government telling me what I do and don't want. I also think revealed preference is a valuable measurement for art, where I think entertainment value really is paramount. I'm just not sure how it's coherent to argue that art can have a value that exists outside people's reaction to it.

And even when it comes to selling products in the private market, I don't really think workers should be generalizing their own affective experience of things to other peoples'! I think the comparison to eating habits is instructive because I would not describe my eating habits as healthy by any means, but I'm in good shape because of genetics, social class (i.e. what foods my parents exposed me to as a kid and what I can afford) and exercise. How unhealthy a given habit is really does vary from person to person, which makes it risky to conclude that it's just common sense that a given consumer product is a net utilitarian loss.

So on one level, fine; if everyone working for Meta decides they don't like making the thing they make and they leave, I won't be too much worse off. But if that principle started extending to Ben & Jerry's, I'd be pretty put out.

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Matt, all you need to know about the people who work at Meta is they are a tiny slice of the tech world and they make the top pay in the industry. Total comp for most of its software teams ranges from $500k-1.5M per year, which is quite a bit higher than the alternatives.

People self-select into Meta, and Meta does actually have a horrible reputation - most people in industry wouldn’t work there, and they have some challenges recruiting people compared to other big tech firms. But saying “the workers should care” is wasting your breath. The people who decided to work there went in knowing full well what Meta is about and decided that they don’t care, the money is worth it.

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Personally I've noticed that I feel much less bad about spending time on social media when using apps that don't involve algorithms. Is there any way for society in general to promote that over more algorithm focused options? Interested to hear what people think.

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Aug 29, 2022·edited Aug 29, 2022

I largely accept this take, but have a small reservation about the idea that we can infer that major tech CEOs have “iron will”because they’re thin. There can be at least two alternative explanations: 1. Different people are tempted by different things. I’m a great food lover. Restaurants are one of the things I greatly enjoy on trips, cooking at home etc. and yet I never snack and that’s never a struggle. I’m simply never “tempted” to eat beyond my hunger. By contrast I’m definitely tempted by other things and do them beyond what I’d like (eg commenting too much here sometimes) so it’s not that my willpower is necessarily stronger than other people’s, nor that I don’t greatly enjoy food.

2. Environment matters tons: we know obesity inversely correlated to wealth. Beyond that I expect that even when something tempts you it’s always situational: take away my wi fi or my spare time and I won’t comment here. By the same token I won’t be surprised if the lifestyle of the tech billionaire ceos leaves them literally fewer opportunities for food temptations even if they’re the tempted type AND gives them enormous opportunities to compensate (personal trainers, optimized diets etc).

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I'm not sure I agree with you on this one. Some products are for the masses. Like those mealy pale tomatoes that are used in fast food restaurants. They are a bad product, but they do serve a purpose. But their existence and prominence in the culinary world caused a resurgence of terrific heirloom tomatoes. That's how the market corrects itself. A variety of investors try to stoke different parts of the market for both their psychic and monetary benefit. People interested in producing a product of quality, will always operate in a variety of niches. That's because the big money will always push a business towards appealing to the lowest common denominator, where your business seeks to take advantage of the fact that people are unhappy being treated like they are part of the LCD. That's how capitalism works. The problem is social media footprints are so large and the market is so new, they are still in the process of optimizing the LCD and niche markets like Substack and other delivery processes are still developing. Meta will never become the product you would like it to be. But some of the people who work there will go on to create the social media version of heirloom tomatoes.

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Great piece. I do hope you realize that Twitter is not substantially different.

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I think the discussion of revealed preferences is key here. As someone in computing, I encounter lots of people who have the idea that revealed preferences are the only true preferences, and everything else is delusion. This is obviously unworkable as a theory of human psychology once you learn anything at all about how people work but it's nonetheless very common. And it underwrites a lot of problematic ideas ranging from Reels to car design.

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This touches on an idea I've wanted to write up for some time. I think the notion of 'preference' as a single, unitary thing has been particularly pernicious, and is demonstrably false. We do not have a single, discernible preference for one thing over another in all circumstances, and that preference is very certainly not revealed by our behavior.

This becomes obvious with a straightforward thought experiment: Consider the obese person who would like to be thin. They are presented with a cookie. They claim they want to be thin, but they eat the cookie anyway. The naive economist says "Well, their revealed preference is to eat the cookie, so obviously they prefer consumption to thinness".

However, what if there existed a pill that would disable the craving for the cookie. This very same person would probably take that pill and *choose* to switch off their craving for the cookie, and then make a different choice the next time they were in that situation. What this reveals is that this isn't an issue of *preference*, at least not in the naive sense. It is an issue of choice architecture, in this case mediated by the available technology.

Given the current state of cookie-desire technology, cookie-related choices have to be made on an individual basis, in the moment. And choices made on an individual basis, in the moment, give more strength to the "lower" (metaphorically, and maybe also literally) parts of our brains. However, that very same person's "higher" executive decision making apparatus may very well make the exact opposite choice.

I think the question we need to start asking of technology: digital, pharmaceutical, and otherwise is: How can we create a world in which we can shift more of our everyday decision making to our executive apparatus and away from our lizard brain? This is a pathway to a better world, for everyone. And the first step on that path, I think, is understanding that preference is not one thing, and it is definitely not something that can be simplistically revealed by behavior.

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founding

Many of the famed Obama-era digital wizards went on to work at Meta and other silicon valley click-generators. I guess H.L. Mencken was right: "Democracy [and Meta - editor] is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

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