Stepping back a couple thousand feet, much of what makes us vulnerable to all the purported bias, capture, and revolving door manipulation in media and technology is our ongoing choice to seek an intermediary between ourselves and our community.
Rather than directly engaging with our local (and immediate but non-local) community to learn about its needs and support its health, we've increasingly oriented ourselves almost exclusively towards abstract regional, national, and international concerns that we might only experience through some media intermediary.
We invite ourselves to develop anger or pity or righteousness towards figures that enter our lives through the same channels and with the same illistration techniques of theatrical characters while barely knowing the names of our neighbors let alone the challenges that they're facing this week or this month.
An simple off-ramp is to stop doing that, taking a stroll around the block to see if somebody needs help or company instead of scrolling through social media or watching TV news for the latest recounting of some faraway and universally misrepresented drama.
As citizens in regional and national democracies, it's important for us to be informed about issues at those scales but becoming sufficiently informed about those issues requires no more than an occasional exercise in research when it's approaching time to make a vote or when someone we're personally connected to asks us to contribute concretely towards a cause.
Removing bias and manipulation from the media and technology platforms is a Sisyphian task, but disempowering biased media and technology platforms only requires ignoring them.
And once you do so, you get a lot of energy back for supporting individuals you actually know and who can support you in return.
I don't think it's simple at all. Kinda like saying "It's simple, stop doing crack" or "Stop caffeine" or whatever.
The problem is 'local' is boring in general in most places in the world (maybe unless you live in downtown NYC or something). I'm from nowhere in the midwest in the days before the internet. Other than the 3 channels on TV, or going down to the library, the world was a tiny place. After experiencing the connectedness of the modern world, you're going to have to drag most people kicking and screaming back to those days gone by. People aren't going to ignore the addiction feed, much in the same way they aren't ignoring meth, pills, and whatever else they can get high on.
Local is anything but boring. It’s the main political sphere you can personally influence. It’s not unusual for a local candidate to win by a handful of votes, maybe people you personally persuaded. Local candidates are also far less polished than national ones, so you get all sorts of characters.
Local politics is what decides your school board, police, and zoning regulations. There may be small time corruption and things often get heated.
Maybe the reason local politics seems boring is because local media is largely hollowed out and acquired by huge national corporations like Grey Media Group. Local TV news has become sports, weather and crime mostly.
> It’s not unusual for a local candidate to win by a handful of votes
Where about 10-20% of the population is voting at all. This is because the 'average' person isn't politically connected to these local events, and mostly never has been in the US. The first moment anything else interesting showed up. And with TV/internet/mass global communication that constant feed is here. Hell, it started showing up decades ago with the advent of 24/7 news.
Your local media simply can't drive a torrent of 30 second clips like tik-toc can. Your local populace just isn't that interesting. No matter how much they try to complete, there is orders of magnitude of difference in scale between them.
I think GP used "simple" not as a synonom for "easy", but as opposite to "complex". i.e. the off-ramp is easy to understand, but possibly hard to implement.
If in my life, I saw one person, and then saw every other person on earth, and then saw the first person again, and then died, then, after seeing each person on earth once, then the fraction that I would never see again would be less than 0.9999999999 , i.e. 99.99999999% .
Look: I come across literally thousands of people just taking a stroll through a busy airport once, and I will literally never see them again for as long as I live.
Now imagine how many people I come across just taking a walk through a city: Tens if not hundreds of thousands. And again: I will literally never see them again for as long as I live.
Now consider how many people I would come across just doomwatching/scrolling the media: At least a few dozen authors, casters, and editors and millions if not billions of people portrayed by them. And not only will I literally never see them again for as long as I live, technically I haven't even seen them yet.
So arguably, I put down too few nines.
Stalin was on to something when he said one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic.
No I mean, I gave the maximum number of nines that you could possibly be justified in listing.
The maximum number of nines, would be in the case that I described: in which you meet every other person on earth, but only one of them will you ever meet again.
And, based on the current total population of the earth, that would be less than 10 nines.
I'm saying, if you came across 8 billion people, and would only see one of them ever again, as long as you live, then that would be less than 10 nines.
Well, I wouldn't say we are "in agreement" on this. The reason I commented initially just on the number of nines, is because that was a clear cut thing, which I thought kind of amusing.
Certainly I agree that one cannot really mentally keep thinking long-term about each individual person one encounters That would take too much time.
Unfortunately, my capacity to regard is limited. If I tried regarding every damn person on the planet I can't regard anyone. I am thusly going to disregard people I don't know in preference to the small handful of people I do know and will have meaning in my limited life.
“Productive” is an interesting word choice, because so many people seek out new causes, problems and politics in an attempt to be exactly that.
Whether it is productive or not is up for debate, but what if the problem is the societal focus on productivity, which is an individual pursuit, rather than on community and relationships?
Productivity can be a communal/societal effort, and indeed the primary reason for creating communities and societies is to increase productivity beyond the means of a single individual.
If nothing else, this post is kind of conflating 2 different things: (a) do search rankings display a bias, and (b) is a "revolving door" and close relationships leading tech companies to deliberately induce such bias. I think it's important to distinguish them, because I think (a) is obviously true, and (b) is probably mostly false. Managing bias is a wildly difficult thing to do, especially with something as complex and correlated with everything as politics. There is no such thing as an "unbiased" ranking, just like there's no such thing as "unbiased" journalism.
> There is no such thing as an "unbiased" ranking, just like there's no such thing as "unbiased" journalism.
Correct. But you can use techniques, to reduce bias. And not use others, notably tracking, so eliminating what can be bias or perhaps better put influence.
Besides that the bias of publishers and platforms matters less the more diversity we have. We have many news publishers for example, but in search the dominance of Google means we have little diversity.
I don't think big companies do such "deliberately" (in the sense that a human made the explicit decision to do it). But when there is a certain behavior that performs better in practice, then such behavior will proliferate.
I say, that when the effect is known, and the company chooses not to reduce it, they are acting deliberately. The purpose of a system is what it does.
I agree, that the relation between the effect and the specific behavior may not be obvious, as you pointed out ("Managing bias is a wildly difficult..."). But it seems that google does not even acknowledge, that this effect exists [1].
Beside the intention, I think the more interesting questions would be:
Do the induce such a bias (deliberately or not)?
Do the induce any bias at all?
To see an example of mass media manipulation, one only has to compare Palestine coverage in social media to Palestine coverage in online mainstream newspapers.
Which one of those is supposed to reflect the non-biased viewpoint? Most mainstream newspapers for example basically take the US government’s stance on geopolitical matters, but the US government is anything but unbiased.
> Is Mojeek just another Bing or Google syndicate?
> No. Mojeek’s web search results are 100% independent. They come from our crawler (MojeekBot) and index of the web, and are ordered using our own ranking algorithms.
The ideal here would be if there was some sort of model to build up a big centralised generic index and then different providers do different tweaks to the rankings on top of that (kinda like DuckDuckGo, at the moment I like their operating model).
However, even in the worst case, assuming everyone just uses Google and Google continues their path of political activism ... this is still an almost incomprehensible improvement over the absolute disaster that has been the mainstream media over identifiable history.
It is interesting to look at something like the Trump presidency in the US and compare how effectively it would have been buried by the media in ages past vs today where they just can't shut a vocal minority up. We'll see the same effect across every other minority group too - on topics that a significant number of people care about it is nigh impossible to kill off a message and marginalise the messenger these days. Things like Assange and Snowden, Epstein, the Panama papers, or the various other political scandals that break are harder to clamp down on. The fake consensus on how great all the wars are is also under constant pressure and getting harder to maintain.
It doesn't really matter if a group like Google puts their thumb on the scale, they can't control the pressure that all the free speech is bringing to bear in any sort of half-free market for search even with the benefits of incumbency.
I think your underlying assumption is that the results of search engines are uncorrelated, and therefore aggregating them will minimize bias. But they are not. Most news in English will be written by American or British news outlets for example.
The genius of social media as an information control mechanism is that it gives people the illusion that they can speak and influence others. In reality, they are just yelling into a void.
Unless you are a major internet personality, few people will see your posts. The scale of your reach will be too small to matter, or only filtered back to those who already agree with you, producing little social change from the dialogue.
Stepping back a couple thousand feet, much of what makes us vulnerable to all the purported bias, capture, and revolving door manipulation in media and technology is our ongoing choice to seek an intermediary between ourselves and our community.
Rather than directly engaging with our local (and immediate but non-local) community to learn about its needs and support its health, we've increasingly oriented ourselves almost exclusively towards abstract regional, national, and international concerns that we might only experience through some media intermediary.
We invite ourselves to develop anger or pity or righteousness towards figures that enter our lives through the same channels and with the same illistration techniques of theatrical characters while barely knowing the names of our neighbors let alone the challenges that they're facing this week or this month.
An simple off-ramp is to stop doing that, taking a stroll around the block to see if somebody needs help or company instead of scrolling through social media or watching TV news for the latest recounting of some faraway and universally misrepresented drama.
As citizens in regional and national democracies, it's important for us to be informed about issues at those scales but becoming sufficiently informed about those issues requires no more than an occasional exercise in research when it's approaching time to make a vote or when someone we're personally connected to asks us to contribute concretely towards a cause.
Removing bias and manipulation from the media and technology platforms is a Sisyphian task, but disempowering biased media and technology platforms only requires ignoring them.
And once you do so, you get a lot of energy back for supporting individuals you actually know and who can support you in return.
>An simple off-ramp is to stop doing that,
I don't think it's simple at all. Kinda like saying "It's simple, stop doing crack" or "Stop caffeine" or whatever.
The problem is 'local' is boring in general in most places in the world (maybe unless you live in downtown NYC or something). I'm from nowhere in the midwest in the days before the internet. Other than the 3 channels on TV, or going down to the library, the world was a tiny place. After experiencing the connectedness of the modern world, you're going to have to drag most people kicking and screaming back to those days gone by. People aren't going to ignore the addiction feed, much in the same way they aren't ignoring meth, pills, and whatever else they can get high on.
Local is anything but boring. It’s the main political sphere you can personally influence. It’s not unusual for a local candidate to win by a handful of votes, maybe people you personally persuaded. Local candidates are also far less polished than national ones, so you get all sorts of characters.
Local politics is what decides your school board, police, and zoning regulations. There may be small time corruption and things often get heated.
Maybe the reason local politics seems boring is because local media is largely hollowed out and acquired by huge national corporations like Grey Media Group. Local TV news has become sports, weather and crime mostly.
>Local is anything but boring.
> It’s not unusual for a local candidate to win by a handful of votes
Where about 10-20% of the population is voting at all. This is because the 'average' person isn't politically connected to these local events, and mostly never has been in the US. The first moment anything else interesting showed up. And with TV/internet/mass global communication that constant feed is here. Hell, it started showing up decades ago with the advent of 24/7 news.
Your local media simply can't drive a torrent of 30 second clips like tik-toc can. Your local populace just isn't that interesting. No matter how much they try to complete, there is orders of magnitude of difference in scale between them.
I think GP used "simple" not as a synonom for "easy", but as opposite to "complex". i.e. the off-ramp is easy to understand, but possibly hard to implement.
[flagged]
that is way too many nines.
If in my life, I saw one person, and then saw every other person on earth, and then saw the first person again, and then died, then, after seeing each person on earth once, then the fraction that I would never see again would be less than 0.9999999999 , i.e. 99.99999999% .
>that is way too many nines.
Look: I come across literally thousands of people just taking a stroll through a busy airport once, and I will literally never see them again for as long as I live.
Now imagine how many people I come across just taking a walk through a city: Tens if not hundreds of thousands. And again: I will literally never see them again for as long as I live.
Now consider how many people I would come across just doomwatching/scrolling the media: At least a few dozen authors, casters, and editors and millions if not billions of people portrayed by them. And not only will I literally never see them again for as long as I live, technically I haven't even seen them yet.
So arguably, I put down too few nines.
Stalin was on to something when he said one death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic.
No I mean, I gave the maximum number of nines that you could possibly be justified in listing. The maximum number of nines, would be in the case that I described: in which you meet every other person on earth, but only one of them will you ever meet again. And, based on the current total population of the earth, that would be less than 10 nines.
I'm saying, if you came across 8 billion people, and would only see one of them ever again, as long as you live, then that would be less than 10 nines.
I admit the number of nines is as much artistic license to drive home a point as it is a possibly realistic statistic.
Either way, we seem in agreement.
Well, I wouldn't say we are "in agreement" on this. The reason I commented initially just on the number of nines, is because that was a clear cut thing, which I thought kind of amusing.
Certainly I agree that one cannot really mentally keep thinking long-term about each individual person one encounters That would take too much time.
Yet, see Matthew 25:40-45 .
Your disregard of people you do not personally know is repugnant.
One of the most beautiful and sublime things about our human species is our ability to care deeply for others we may never directly know.
Unfortunately, my capacity to regard is limited. If I tried regarding every damn person on the planet I can't regard anyone. I am thusly going to disregard people I don't know in preference to the small handful of people I do know and will have meaning in my limited life.
“Productive” is an interesting word choice, because so many people seek out new causes, problems and politics in an attempt to be exactly that.
Whether it is productive or not is up for debate, but what if the problem is the societal focus on productivity, which is an individual pursuit, rather than on community and relationships?
Productivity can be a communal/societal effort, and indeed the primary reason for creating communities and societies is to increase productivity beyond the means of a single individual.
If nothing else, this post is kind of conflating 2 different things: (a) do search rankings display a bias, and (b) is a "revolving door" and close relationships leading tech companies to deliberately induce such bias. I think it's important to distinguish them, because I think (a) is obviously true, and (b) is probably mostly false. Managing bias is a wildly difficult thing to do, especially with something as complex and correlated with everything as politics. There is no such thing as an "unbiased" ranking, just like there's no such thing as "unbiased" journalism.
> There is no such thing as an "unbiased" ranking, just like there's no such thing as "unbiased" journalism.
Correct. But you can use techniques, to reduce bias. And not use others, notably tracking, so eliminating what can be bias or perhaps better put influence.
Besides that the bias of publishers and platforms matters less the more diversity we have. We have many news publishers for example, but in search the dominance of Google means we have little diversity.
> to deliberately induce such bias
I don't think big companies do such "deliberately" (in the sense that a human made the explicit decision to do it). But when there is a certain behavior that performs better in practice, then such behavior will proliferate.
I say, that when the effect is known, and the company chooses not to reduce it, they are acting deliberately. The purpose of a system is what it does.
I agree, that the relation between the effect and the specific behavior may not be obvious, as you pointed out ("Managing bias is a wildly difficult..."). But it seems that google does not even acknowledge, that this effect exists [1].
Beside the intention, I think the more interesting questions would be:
Do the induce such a bias (deliberately or not)? Do the induce any bias at all?
[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/google-2016-...
To see an example of mass media manipulation, one only has to compare Palestine coverage in social media to Palestine coverage in online mainstream newspapers.
Which one of those is supposed to reflect the non-biased viewpoint? Most mainstream newspapers for example basically take the US government’s stance on geopolitical matters, but the US government is anything but unbiased.
You just answered your own question.
Does Mojeek use Google or Bing to get its results? Or is it separately crawling the web for search results?
From https://www.mojeek.com/about/why-mojeek :
> Is Mojeek just another Bing or Google syndicate?
> No. Mojeek’s web search results are 100% independent. They come from our crawler (MojeekBot) and index of the web, and are ordered using our own ranking algorithms.
My question: how do they expect to make money?
We can run contextual ads, and have API customers: https://www.mojeek.com/services/search/web-search-api/
how does mojeek compare to kagi in general?
Kagi uses the Mojeek API as one of it's main sources.
The ideal here would be if there was some sort of model to build up a big centralised generic index and then different providers do different tweaks to the rankings on top of that (kinda like DuckDuckGo, at the moment I like their operating model).
However, even in the worst case, assuming everyone just uses Google and Google continues their path of political activism ... this is still an almost incomprehensible improvement over the absolute disaster that has been the mainstream media over identifiable history.
It is interesting to look at something like the Trump presidency in the US and compare how effectively it would have been buried by the media in ages past vs today where they just can't shut a vocal minority up. We'll see the same effect across every other minority group too - on topics that a significant number of people care about it is nigh impossible to kill off a message and marginalise the messenger these days. Things like Assange and Snowden, Epstein, the Panama papers, or the various other political scandals that break are harder to clamp down on. The fake consensus on how great all the wars are is also under constant pressure and getting harder to maintain.
It doesn't really matter if a group like Google puts their thumb on the scale, they can't control the pressure that all the free speech is bringing to bear in any sort of half-free market for search even with the benefits of incumbency.
I think your underlying assumption is that the results of search engines are uncorrelated, and therefore aggregating them will minimize bias. But they are not. Most news in English will be written by American or British news outlets for example.
It isn't, I explicitly rejected that idea. 2nd paragraph.
The media is actually fueling the vocal minority. If they weren't reported on, they would just be yet another fringe group.
The genius of social media as an information control mechanism is that it gives people the illusion that they can speak and influence others. In reality, they are just yelling into a void.
Unless you are a major internet personality, few people will see your posts. The scale of your reach will be too small to matter, or only filtered back to those who already agree with you, producing little social change from the dialogue.