1/ I just watched 'The Social Dilemma' on Netflix & also started reading 'Calling Bullshit' some days ago. Everybody should watch the film, understand how our 'attention is being extracted', how dangerous this can be and think about how we can change things...
2/ "..never before in history have 50 designers 20-35 yr-old white guys in California made decisions that have an impact on 2 billion people...who will have thoughts that they didn't intend to have because a designer at Google said, "This is how notifications work on that screen
3/ ..that you wake up to in the morning." So do I realize that I am in very real danger of not being myself any more, of not thinking my own thoughts? That the machine stands to gain from "addiction, polarization, radicalization, outragification, vanitification.."
4/ "A magician shows you a card trick
and says, "Pick a card, any card." What you don't realize
was that they've done a set-up, so you pick the card
they want you to pick. And that's how Facebook works.
Facebook sits there and says,
5/ "Hey, you pick your friends. You pick the links that you follow."..that's all nonsense. It's just like the magician. FB is in charge of your news feed. We all simply are operating on a different set of facts. When that happens at scale, you're no longer able to reckon with ...
6/ or even consume information that contradicts with that world view that you've created. That means we aren't actually being objective, constructive individuals. And then you look over at the other side, and you start to think, "How can those people be so stupid?
7/ Look at all of this information that I'm constantly seeing. How are they not seeing that same information?"
"They're not seeing that same information."
So do we realize we are in echo chambers and who gains from keeping us in these echo chambers?
8/ The film suggests various things to address the issue e.g. regulation like taxing companies on the data assets
that they have. Give them a fiscal reason to not acquire every piece of data on the planet. That may help, but then politicians very much want to use these tools..
9/ "If we don't agree on what is true or that there is such a thing as truth, we're toast. This is the problem
beneath other problems because if we can't agree on what's true, then we can't navigate out of any of our problems.", the film says, but I don't agree...
10/ While we are occupied with trying to figure out 'what the truth is', politicians & big business will accelerate polarization & radicalization. For us to be our selves, we need think simply & clearly...we need to understand if something is divisive & serves vested interests...
11/ "If it seems like it's something designed to really push your emotional buttons", be very suspicious. If we remain 'our selves', we will survive & buy ourselves time to 'call bullshit' & figure out the truth. Even the specific truth though is often not important..
12/ Does leading a rich life require us to know the facts of where 'Rama was born', 'How SSR died' etc.? Yes, the truth about certain things needs to be known & we cannot be naive... but are we being manipulated into becoming 'the crowd' by this so called 'search for truth'?
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