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by joemoon 743 days ago
While the post didn't particularly speak to me, I think you are being overly reductionist. You can dismissively summarize anything into a few "key points."

Just in the first couple of paragraphs alone:

- The author discusses the "why" by pointing to research on how new information triggers dopamine pathways. Maybe this is obvious to you but it's not necessarily obvious to everyone.

- The author points out that this would have historically been an evolutionary advantage (at least that's my interpretation), but access to modern high-volume, low-nutrient information has made this an addictive unhealthy habit.

- For those already familiar with how modern access to high-calorie, low-nutrient food (that triggers the dopamine response), the author is showing that the same mechanisms are at play with information.

I think it's actually your comment that contains the tweet-able one liners (as "key points") that are likely to result in head nods and smug self assurances but aren't doing anything to encourage deeper thought.

1 comments

Honestly, I like both of your posts. Thanks for the follow-up. Your thoughts are insightful. I hear it a lot that "too much information is ruining us", but what about crap daily newspapers that came in mass around 1900, then radio, then over-air television, then cable television? All of these are about providing large amounts of low quality information. These days, you can get satellite TV with 500 (five hundred!) channels. It must be 99% rubbish content. I guess the difference now is that the web is much more interactive, and our minds can be more easily hooked as a result. Dunno; when I was growing up, the kids who gorged themselves on shitty cable TV weren't the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. I feel the same now in the Internet era.

My point for this post: Each time I hear (paraphrased): "It is different this time.", I try to imagine the world 25 years ago. Then think: Is this really that different? Most of time, I think, "No, it isn't that different." (I use the same mental exercise when I hear people say that "this generation is so different than the last for reason A, B, or C.")

> but what about crap daily newspapers that came in mass around 1900, then radio, then over-air television, then cable television?

a) None of these were, first algorithmically, and then using machine learning, optimized to constantly grab attention and maximize interaction time on an individual basis.

b) None of them had the interactive effects where peoples interactions with one another are guided and used, to draw them into echo chambers which are, again, designed to maximize interaction time.

> Then think: Is this really that different?

Yes. It is. Simple example: How do politically motivated troll armies influence an election in a reality where people don't use social media as their primary news source? Answer: They don't. They can (and likely have) bought some space in some low-quality tabloid through strawmen, but that has nowhere near the range and impact of one guy in some government office pretending to be 100000 "Average Joes" halfway across the globe.

> How do politically motivated troll armies influence an election in a reality where people don't use social media as their primary news source? Answer: They don't.

To what degree do they "influence" an election in our "reality"? (And, how many people can even genuinely and substantially wonder what the truth of the matter is after growing up in countries subject to Western "influence"?)

In percentage terms please, and please explicitly acknowledge opinions as such.

Sorry for ruining a good story (did you even notice you didn't answer the question, but instead posted a bunch of stories...how do you think these things work), but the topic and specific nature of the accusations (misinformation) demands it.

the articles they posted had lots of explanations of how the writer of said articles thought things work, perhaps they (the poster) thinks that these things work as laid out in the articles and thus are not required to explain in extra detail how they think these things work.

In relation to percentages, lots of the articles had numbers, you could also do the work of deriving percentages from the numbers if you were so inclined.

>did you even notice you didn't answer the question,

the way English and Internet communication work if you quote a question and then give a bunch of links it is reasonable to assume that is the way they are answering the question - in short they believe that the links they provide are a good faith explanation of 'what degree "they" "influence" an election in our "reality"'.

>and please explicitly acknowledge opinions as such.

You seem to want them to do an awful lot of work to answer your short one paragraph question!

Please be aware that a lot of stories about bots on social media are themselves misinformation. If you trace them back to the sources you arrive at academic papers that are just intellectually fraudulent in various ways, like they misrepresent their data or they are identifying real westerners as Russian bots. I did some deep dives on this topic back in 2017-2018 or so:

https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...

https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n...

Also, a lot of stories on Russia are or were plain old western misinformation, long predating Ukraine:

https://blog.plan99.net/правда-6e24757a67ba

So it's very important to be careful when making claims about "influencing elections" because there's such a long history of false claims from western sources, amplified by western media, of which the outlets you've cited are prime offenders unfortunately.

As this subject is interesting to me, I decided to read one of your articles to understand where you are coming from. And I came across this part[0]:

> The cited evidence is two men who joined the Lithuanian Rifleman’s Union, an organisation with a stable membership of around 10,000 people (0.3% of the population). ... The article presents no data or other evidence to suggest behavioural changes in the Lithuanian population: the anecdote of two people is generalised to the entire country.

So I checked the article and it says:

> "We are growing dramatically in numbers. Three years ago we had 50 people in Vilnius - now we have 3,000."

and then:

> Some 4,000 troops are being shipped out to the region - with 1,000 German soldiers allocated to Lithuania.

So while I believe your engagement in bot detection is genuine and you can offer some useful insights into how some bot detection platform are broken, as for the field reporting, forgive me but I still trust more traditional journalists than you, in spite of living on this Earth long enough to realize everything is imperfect.

[0] https://blog.plan99.net/правда-6e24757a67ba

I want to believe you but now I have to trust your claims over what the NYT, etc are publishing. In order to do that I not only need to follow your sources but the original sources that NYT etc define to ensure they are the same. I also have to make my own conclusions about the data to see if I agree with anyone’s analysis. Frankly it’s too much to do when all I want is a few dopamine hits in the middle of the night before I can fall asleep again.
Hi Mike, so I'm watching what is happening in the misinformation are right now and while I don't disagree some people might have gotten some details wrong, somebody - or at least quite a lot of somebodys - is parroting the same statements that come from Kremlin on a mass scale. Some of these statements are completely untrue, many contains bits of real information mixed with false statements. I don't know who is behind these and I will never have a proof, but ignoring this massive phenomena will get us nowhere.

Specifically, what gets me worried is not the subset that is related to making Westerners averse to supporting Ukraine but many subtle and not so subtle attempts at sowing discord using the divisions already present in our society. This really works extremely well and we're super-weak when faced with these.

It’s obvious that there are misinformation campaigns coming from Russia and China directed at Americans and others. That people suddenly no longer believe in the efficacy of the polio vaccine and other nonsense is evidence of the power of disinformation campaigns. Since they are effective, easy to do, and cheap it’s clear that all major state actors will engage in such things.
>Simple example: How do politically motivated troll armies influence an election in a reality where people don't use social media as their primary news source?

By having one super rich troll run for president and buy hour long slots of evening broadcasting. See Ross Perot.

I mean there's a world of difference between "Perhaps millions of people, given motivation and a bit of luck, can pull off a thing" and "A super rich guy can pull off a thing"

This is the whole reason people talk about middle-class modern humans of various recent eras "living like kings" in comparison to humans of less recent eras. The thing (Maybe that's "having people from across the world entertain you in your living room", maybe it's "Eating elaborately prepared deserts made out of refined sugar") was possible for some before, but not nearly as many. This is the kind of thing technology tends to change most often. Not best-case capability, but access and scale

Like some of those things are mass-produced superstimulus facsimiles and not good in the same way they were for the ultrawealthy of old, but even those genuinely are changes in how the world effectively works

> deserts

I like to use the mnemonic "One S for sand, two S's for tasty shit."

A typo in this case, but appreciated nonetheless

The warlords gathering with deserts in their eyes may never get their just deserts even if their habit of eating just desserts leaves them obese

For while we may get told every other day we live like kings, I am more of a mind to suffer no kings at all in the first place

> Each time I hear (paraphrased): "It is different this time.", I try to imagine the world 25 years ago. Then think: Is this really that different? Most of time, I think, "No, it isn't that different."

Just be careful not to base your conclusion on anecdata. There are legitimate differences amongst generations in addition to the many commonly held misconceptions, e.g. Millennials are poorer than Boomers were at the same age.

I'd you're interested, check out Jean Twenge's book "Generations" for a look at the differences backed by the best available data.