When a community is formed, an implied set of rules are generated and applied. They evolve and change as time goes on. Sometimes they are the cause of the community dying, sometimes they are the reason is thrives.
Whether its a sports community (woo football is the greatest!) or a specific team (fuck the other team, booo) or cycling. Each community has a set of rules that you need to abide by in order for it to function.
Now, if you go and break those implied rules, you get told off.
A community falls apart when two or more factions form opposing implied rules in the same shared space. For photography, it could be the use of photoshop, digital cameras or, more recently AI. Either the factions learn to get on, or they break away and find somewhere more accepting. That is the natural order.
You could equally present those things as "wrongthink". But more practically its just a regulation mechanism for human interaction.
Now, you'll counter that "big corporations/politics determining what we see is bad", and then reference some time in the 90s where no such system existed. The problem is that the US media was brilliant at self censorship. Sure you could get specialist publications that catered to whatever taboo subject you wanted, just as you can now.
The issue is, online there are no constraints on behaviour. If I shout at 13 year old kid in the street that I'm going to fuck their mum, burn their house down, and generally verbally abuse them, generally someone will intervene and stop me. Thats not wrongthink, thats society. There is not scalable mechanism for doing that on online communities.
Is this AI bit the way to do it? no, its made by insular collegekids who've barely lived in the real world.
All “wrongthink”? Like if someone expresses suicidal thoughts, the bot should say “whatever, do what you want”?
I disagree. Apps are products with an editorial component. Editorials should be opinionated. It is passive and immature to simply not care how one’s products are used. Oppenheimer and Alfred Nobel have wise words on this topic.
Everyone wants to be the hero in their own story, changing your beliefs requires introspection and humility. It's far easier to blame somebody else than yourself and take responsibility. It's trivial to feed people some narrative that trivializes reality and, in their mind, acknowledges them as underdogs and elevates them as "right".
The triviality of this allows malevolent actors to disrupt society and produce a chasm through echo chambers, each amplifying particular voices and shifting narrative.
Free speech is important, but it won't be found on X, or pravda-dot-social, and as much has been proven multiple times. What I take issue with and hint at is that neither of these are platforms that support free-speech, they are merely illusions, and people who yap about wrongthink are exactly those oblivious to said fact.
Personally, I am tired of arguing with people, I am tired of seeking truth in conversations with people unwilling to change their minds, I just want to live my life, safely.
I think that’s right. I broadly agree with everything you’ve written here. I’m just dissatisfied with this as a status quo, where more reasonable people have [justifiably] resigned themselves to the reality that reasoning with the unreasonable doesn’t usually pay [moral] dividends.
But in reality, this has been the status quo for all of
Humanity. It’s just that we now have this infinite ledger via the internet to document it. Only 200 years ago, your “honest opinion” would find you in the gallows more often than not across the world. This “progressed” to social exile in lieu of said gallows, and now to seeking out the like minded in echo chambers. I will hold out hope that interfacing with articulate AI’s can support more people to regain their identity and confidence where so many lack the courage to try publicly (or are surrounded by the foolish).
When a community is formed, an implied set of rules are generated and applied. They evolve and change as time goes on. Sometimes they are the cause of the community dying, sometimes they are the reason is thrives.
Whether its a sports community (woo football is the greatest!) or a specific team (fuck the other team, booo) or cycling. Each community has a set of rules that you need to abide by in order for it to function.
Now, if you go and break those implied rules, you get told off.
A community falls apart when two or more factions form opposing implied rules in the same shared space. For photography, it could be the use of photoshop, digital cameras or, more recently AI. Either the factions learn to get on, or they break away and find somewhere more accepting. That is the natural order.
You could equally present those things as "wrongthink". But more practically its just a regulation mechanism for human interaction.
Now, you'll counter that "big corporations/politics determining what we see is bad", and then reference some time in the 90s where no such system existed. The problem is that the US media was brilliant at self censorship. Sure you could get specialist publications that catered to whatever taboo subject you wanted, just as you can now.
The issue is, online there are no constraints on behaviour. If I shout at 13 year old kid in the street that I'm going to fuck their mum, burn their house down, and generally verbally abuse them, generally someone will intervene and stop me. Thats not wrongthink, thats society. There is not scalable mechanism for doing that on online communities.
Is this AI bit the way to do it? no, its made by insular collegekids who've barely lived in the real world.