[aero-deck]

The chilling effect may actually be a good thing, given that discourse these days is overheated.

There's a weird magic trick that social media companies have played on people to convince them that the text and images consumed on their websites are socially/culturally/politically relevant. Once it becomes clear how easy it is to fake that text people will come to understand how cheap and irrelevant "opinion" has become and this magic trick will become weakened.

[cvoss]

"Overheated" and "chilled" aren't antonyms here, at least not in the sense I think you're using them.

Overheated: the discourse has too much anger or vitriol, or is too personal and emotionally charged.

Chilled: people have given up on discoursing at all.

If this is what you mean, I don't think we want less discourse as a solution to bad discourse. We want to maintain but temper the discourse.

[aero-deck]

We want an an appropriate degree of emotional engagement with discourse, which is 1-1 with how much discourse is happening. People being too angry is caused by people discoursing too much and vice-versa. There are opposite problems associated w/ too little discourse, but we don't suffer from those.

Things are hyper-polarized right now and there is no magic political synthesis that is right over the horizon if only we could just keep discoursing a little bit more. This is like a heroin addict thinking they'll cease being addicted after that last fix. The solution is to cool things down.

[cvoss]

Personally, that's not been my experience at all. I often find that when I have two friends with highly disparate and deeply held beliefs, the intense emotions they associate to these ideas are due to them not actually engaging each other but, instead, taking their emotional cues from their respective ideological silos (where no real discourse is occurring), and then proceeding to talk past each other.

Learning how to actually talk to one another in good faith with humility and charity is a skill that comes with practice. Deciding to engage each other less can worsen the situation by allowing one camp's preconceived notions about another camp to go unchallenged by reality. This allows each camp to tell an increasingly vilifying story about the other, which increases, rather than decreases, the emotional charge between the two.

[aero-deck]

engaging w/ someone is different from discoursing with them. "engagement" is what social media companies say they provide - but really they just offer "discourse".

[cvoss]

Fair, but what does that distinction do to illuminate your or my arguments?

[_Algernon_]

I would predict that the chilling effect will be lesser for "unreasonable" voices such as trolls and extremists, and will be greater for the moderate voices.

This is not a good thing, as the past 10-15 years of social media has shown.

[uoaei]

The entire thesis of TFA is that human psychological traits on societal scales are not prepared to handle an arena of discourse where that's true, that people will either be duped or completely check out of discourse per se, not limited to online social media.

You hold the opposite position. Why?

[aero-deck]

Because there are actually multiple "arenas of discourse" and people will simply switch the "marketplace" they're using.

It's technocratic hubris to think that there is just a single such arena and that all the others are illegitimate/dangerous.

[uoaei]

No, it's a feature of the human mind that truth is considered objective independent of the lens used to acquire it. "Post-truth" sources in some arenas will be conflated with "real-truth" sources in others, leading to a blanket demotion of the perceived value and quality of truth. The whole argument from TFA is about human psychology, not about specific offerings of "marketplaces" where truth may be more or less maligned.

[aero-deck]

dunno what "TFA" refers to here, but it seems like we're heading into a argument regarding epistemology, which is not a discussion that HN handles well.

IMO "truth" is distraction here because what is at stake here are people's values, not their understanding of math and physics. When people worry about "post-truth", they're worried about liberal values no longer being the unquestioned default. It is absolutely a marketplace, and if people switching marketplaces en-masse makes it harder to launch rockets and develop vaccines, then it probably means those activities are making people net unhappy. People are a lot smarter than we give them credit for, even the dumb ones.

[uoaei]

TFA = the f'ing article, something quite commonly understood on HN for time immemorial. Its snark is borne of the community's distaste of the kind of people who dive into comment sections without engaging with the very subject of and reason the comment thread exists in the first place. The fact you don't recognize this acronym calls into question your authority on what HN can or can't handle. But anyway, that's beside the point.

We are (well, I am, and TFA is) not talking about epistemology so much as the public's inability to engage with epistemological problems on systemic scales. Instead the limits of human psychology control how we as a society respond to these issues. Your argument is a distraction that remains uncontextualized within the conversation it finds itself in.

People are not dumb animals but you won't be able to engage anyone toward a solution on the basis of an argument about how they just need to understand more about epistemology. That's the kind of thing that people can only internalize via empirical means.

At this point it feels like you're being deliberately obtuse. I've been quite clear about the primacy of human psychological limits as the main aspect of the argument and you simply refuse to engage with this point. You haven't been very good about adding to the conversation, only diverting it.

[aero-deck]

> the public's inability to engage with epistemological problems on systemic scales

The public's inability? What about everyone's inability. No one deals well with epistemological problems on a systematic scale, not even the technologists who delude themselves into thinking that they're driving anything.

I am exactly talking about psychological limits. The difference is that I don't think the psychological limits of the creators are any different from those of the users. If anything, I think the creators are more psychologically limited than the users. This is because the creators need to explain to themselves why they are creating the thing - everyone else just puts up with it. When you say ppl will either be duped or completely check out of discourse, don't forget about yourself.

Also, of course I didn't read the article....

[tacocataco]

Is posting the article text in the comments for these people against the rules?

[vkou]

> The chilling effect may actually be a good thing, given that discourse these days is overheated.

So, we'll cement ourselves at the status quo? Or at whatever conditions that serve the powerful?

[hgomersall]

Alternatively, everyone will have chatbots that act as their agents. It will be a huge cesspool of chatbots arguing with each other.

[aero-deck]

right - like how the stock market behaves nowadays w/ quant traders - which then motivated people to construct darkpools of liquidity where the real trading happens.