Silicon Valley Techno-Utopianism

Zuck completely not getting his audience is a recurring theme. Hmm. Maybe if there was an equation

http://i.imgur.com/jGoBwCk.jpg

He believes that deep down humans are computers. If only we had a computer big enough to model them, and alllllll of the data on what they do, then we could predict/control human behavior. It's old-school creepy engineer-dude (or midcentury systems-thinking socal science counterintelligence dude) thinking imho, crossed with big-data privacy-hoovering ambitions. At least that's what I read in it.

the entirety of existence is either a computer or a system capable of being modeled by a computer

*extreme brow furrowing*

Zuck completely not getting his audience is a recurring theme. Hmm. Maybe if there was an equation

hmmmm wonder how the guy who built the most popular social app in the world does not get his audience. maybe he gets his audience too well.

you don't have to know anything about the nuances of human interaction, or even what constitutes good or bad interaction if your number one goal is engagement and traffic

I mean, twitter's content-blind policies were "free speech" in rhetoric, but in reality they were just content-blind

I mean, arguably Robert Moses knew his audience "too well" too

In what sense is the audience for anything Mark Zuckerberg says not "everyone"?

no it's absurd. he's clearly a social interaction savant and we're just social interaction rockists. one day that dude will be president - i don't know if he'll invent a formula to figure it out or just code up his campaign in a two night democracy jam.

you know that all of the actual moderation of flagged material on facebook is done by people making relatively low wages, who aren't even in the same country as the content's origin, right?

it's not like he and the programmers have amazing algorithms, there is literally a group of people in Mexico working for facebook reviewing flagged content for North America

i'm not sure what we're discussing right now, mh

I'd idealistically hope that people can distinguish between design and algorithmic choices that facilitate *more* interaction and content and those that facilitate useful or efficient interaction

every content thread that's addictive because it's half people going "lol, libtard cucks" on facebook followed by a bunch of people earnestly arguing and in-fighting in poorly-threaded conversations... that's a lot of ad impressions

Yeah c'mon Mordy... you can luck into a product that catches on like wildfire without having some kind of super genius insight into human nature. For example, the reasons the inventor think it's got a shot at being moderately successful (''Harvard people love keeping in touch with other alumni from time to time!'') may not be congruent with the reasons why it actually becomes a ginormous success. (See Wiebe Bijker on the development of the safety bicycle.)

Also, in Facebook's case specifically, I suspect many of the most popular and click-sucking features, the ones that have really bound the thing into people's life patterns and sense of self etc., were not necessarily Zuck creations. Meanwhile he just had good timing: Friendster had basically passed and Myspace was adrift just as an explosion in the smartphone market and other contextual X-factors opened the door for SOME more straightforward version of social-networking to take off. Etc.

Anyway, this whole thread is kinda about people who are really successful at enriching themselves through techno-products, whose values/perceptions/ideologies are nonetheless out of step with how many/most people think. Being successful at social networking software doesn't mean you have a keener sense of human society (let alone the deep structure of the human mind) than your average philosopher, truck driver, or ILXor, or even than someone else that hits on a formula that scratches some collective itch at a particular point in time. It's like assuming James Cameron has a particular genius sense of what our humanity means to us based on the success his films about human-nonhuman interaction have found with audiences. Like, idk, maybe, but it'd have to be argued for - there's no self-evident authority on the topic.

You seem to be implying Zuckerberg is successful because he understands the *content* of communication in a way that is beneficial and gives him insight. I'm arguing he, and I'm speaking broadly with him as a stand-in for facebook, understands the *structure* of human communication and how to construct applications, algorithms, and site design in a way that makes people interact *more* without caring about the quality of interaction.

sorry, that was xp to Mordy

you can luck into a product that catches on like wildfire without having some kind of super genius insight into human nature

i think this is kinda silly but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the creator of the oreo understands humans better than any politician who has ever lived: every politician has detractors, but the oreo is universally beloved

the joy of eating oreo's has to do w/ the taste. the joy of using facebook has to do w/ interacting w/ other ppl.

We have no idea what cities would look like had Robert Moses not been in a position of power and influence in NYC, and in time, influenced the design of many other city/suburb plans and transportation/park systems in urban centers

But does that mean Robert Moses' work was a boon? Or that he understood something about human nature? Undoubtedly he was in the top tier of people who influenced human interaction and the structure of lives for his time. There are many more nuanced views on his work that I'm not remotely qualified to delve into

The part that sticks with me, is that knowing he had a virtual monopoly on public transportation and roads, cooked the books in his favor time after time. If you make the most useful route from point A to B a toll road, and predicate your own success on the statistics of how many people use your road (and the monetary income derived from usage fees), then does that mean the toll road was a good idea or merely a self-sustaining one?

The cynic would say that power was an end in itself and whatever keeps you in power is good -- if it was bad, then other ideas would be more successful, or people would see what you're doing and lobby for your replacement, right?

oreos are hydrox knockoffs

boom

Mordy, really, you think that's silly? I guess I can't argue with that kind of objection and won't devote several more paragraphs to reiteratng my attempts to back up my objections. But very briefly I think mh's Oreo analogy is on point; and if the Oreo founder were going around saying ''I think we'll discover soon that human behavior is actually all reducible to a nutritional formula'' it'd be just as silly to say ''hey hang on guys this person has demonstrated they understand human nature better than you, I mean Oreos are on the shelves everywhere!'' I mean that wouldn't even be enough to prove that in a vacuum people prefer Oreos over other cookies, let alone the wisdom of the Nabisco Valley Chemical Utopians.

The authority being ascribed to this guy, in something that is actually not even his field of expertise, is the part of this that's ''silly'' imho and the burden of proof should be on those doing the ascribing.

I think designing a system that attracts a billion users a day to essentially interact with each other suggests an insight into human behavior and relationships that selling a delicious cookie does not.

Now it happens that I think his insights are probably pretty banal, assuming that humans are just pavlovian relationship machines, but they're correct since we're an easily manipulatable life form and our habits can be formed just by putting a like button under a status message.

insights like 'let's A/B test making the font on short status updates way bigger and then use the one that improves interaction metrics'

it's a kind of asinine observation that doesn't thrill those of us who love to read about and discuss the nature of the human soul/mind, etc, but probably generates more realistic + repeatedly models for behavior.

repeatable*

Yeah I mean the Hallmark company also has made a fortune on one aspect of human social interaction that they made profoundly monetizable. I would concede that they understand something about how people feel about the customs of birthdays and funerals at a specific time and place in human history. This would still not make them credentialed authorities on whether our brains are essentially analogous to greeting cards. It would not even prove that they understand the social embeddedness and rituals of greeting cards better than anybody else, since there a ton of other - probably more pressing - factors that determine why one company attains market dominance and another doesn't.

At this point, ascribing the design of Facebook solely to Mark Zuckerberg is like ascribing the design of Microsoft Windows XP solely to Bill Gates. It is likely that MZ may have given the final go-ahead on most of the features in FB, but the origination of the ideas, their refinement, and their coding would all be done by others. He just gets the final presentation and says "yes" or else he makes a tweak or two, just to feel like he's in charge and has the last word. Chances are this has been true for a very long time now.

FB is significantly more complex and insinuates itself into far more corners of people's lives (and on a day to day if not hour to hour basis) than Hallmark cards.

Like FB for many ppl is like a sociobiological appendage not even a useful tool or a liminal ritual adjunct but rather an interface for direct interaction with others and the world. I think the critique that Zuckerberg is not uniquely responsible for it is probably accurate, but I don't understand downplaying its significance.

It's very significant but none of that makes him such an expert on human behavior that any random pronouncement (offered without a supporting argument) should be taken as a credible expert opinion just because ''social'' shows up in there somewhere. Especially since the claim isn't original, and reeks of inherited ideology going back decades. Like if Paul Ryan is banging on about welfare queens or something we don't go, hang on guys, considering this guy knows an awful lot about the government I think we should give credence to his highly original policy thinking which surely results from his close attention to these matters. After all he is a very successful politician so this is really his wheelhouse.

First off I don't know that Paul Ryan is such an expert on government. But second, I think that it makes a lot of sense that a) human behavior is simple and predictable enough that formulae can be developed to chart it, and that b) someone who made his bones designing a human relationship machine that worked so well particularly by treating social interaction like a calculation would be interested in expanding that extraordinary early experiment into something more universal. Like what a shock that Zuckerberg thinks that human interactions can be simplified into a mathematical formula - he's only observed that treating them as though they can has been tremendously lucrative and made his project ubiquitous.

I think that it makes a lot of sense that a) human behavior is simple and predictable enough that formulae can be developed to chart it

This is all well and good, if all you are envisioning is that one may predict certain statistical probabilities across masses of people. That's been going on for quite some time. I think what Zuckerberg suggested might be true was far more radical than that.

I think designing a system that attracts a billion users a day to essentially interact with each other suggests an insight into human behavior and relationships that selling a delicious cookie does not.

― Mordy, Monday, February 27, 2017 12:04 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Through evolutionary design, though! While the core news feed style of interface is intact, there are a myriad of design decisions that have been made as tweaks, new feature rollouts, and proposed directions that have either done well and remained integrated or have dropped off the map. And again, while Zuckerberg has some insight as someone who sits on top of this, he's not the one who's had input other than approving or suggesting initiatives for most of the last decade.

And I don't mean to downplay the significance of facebook -- the amount of time and energy I've expended just scrolling through, making small comments, or debating in posts is not a small thing, although it's hardly the only platform where I've done that.

But facebook is completely quantitative as a "human relationship machine." There is little to no qualitative innovation going on -- there are clues via likes and emotions, the amount of traffic a single user gives to a particular post or page, but if it is determined:
- A post is popular
- Significant number of likes, but a much greater number of comments
- The posts receiving the most likes use mostly negative language
I might, as a programmer, think "hmm, this indicates it's a contentious subject and a number of people are against the original topic, maybe?" but that is one of many interpretations of the pattern we see. And we're back to the idea of interpretation -- what is my goal, here?

If I want qualitatively good interaction, I might have someone moderate the conversation. If I want to track issues that might be problems, I might archive the original post, especially if it's to a news article, so we can see if a trend develops. I might prioritize or deprioritize flagging (moderation requests) to this thread due to the high traffic it's getting.

But all of those are at the bottom of the list because the first question is: how many ad impressions are being served up to this conversation, are they relevant, and what's the clickthrough rate? If this is a topic that spurs discussion, how can I encourage this topic to come up regularly? Should I put a link to this topic in the sidebar?

Because while you might claim insight on human behavior, your actual research is mostly centered not on content but on how traffic can drive more traffic. And content that brings traffic. All without caring whether you're devising a technical system to funnel the most attention into the worst spaces, because you claim to be content agnostic, when in fact, the worst content drives the most attention so you are, in fact, biased in favor of horrible content.

this isn't to say facebook is some infinite development of the most effective content->traffic->monetization funnel, but that is the core of the business

(to the extent that actual content is ephemeral -- the traffic is the main product of facebook, and traffic is always positive and never negative)

Sure, but this is like if someone developed a new management technique that got 300% more productivity out of its workers. You might fairly ask whether it's a good thing for the world and the workers to have them working harder/longer hours or whatever but anything that maximizes X, where X is something associated with human behavior, is going to indicate some insight into the behavior of human beings. Like if your contention is that people are unhappier using facebook than they were before facebook, we don't disagree. But humans do all kinds of things that make them unhappy - we're kinda unhappiness inflicting machines, on ourselves, on others. No surprise that things that harness our power to make ourselves unhappy might have a stronger impact on our behavior.

Your description made me envision facebook as a gigantic maze, where the main objectives are to draw people in, then agitate them to run about as much as possible, while constantly redirecting them deeper and deeper into the maze in the hopes they will never leave again. As with every discussion of facebook I have ever read on ilx, this discussion does not inspire me to regret for one second my not joining fb.

lol otm

yeah i don't disagree with any part of that description xp

lol I was just typing an analogy about mazes

you learn about human beings *will do in a maze* and you learn about the crafting of mazes

only if you particularly endeavor to study, say, happiness or fulfillment do you get insight into the human condition. but you have to actually run the stats to look for that! if you sit there optimizing for "engagement" and nothing else, then you're only going to learn about how to engage people. and not to action, necessarily, but to click on an article again or comment

thanks for the interaction, though, guys

bleeding off a lot of emotional energy today, and I'm glad it's going to ilx instead of a site with ad impressions

huh, kinda looks like there's another theranos, this one in nuclear energy (!??!?!???!)

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603731/nuclear-energy-startup-transatomic-backtracks-on-key-promises/

pretty much all of facebook and human behavior research is boiled down to that one map a guy made where he showed friend linkages across the globe, and it was all the cities connected to all the other cities by a shitload of little lines, except china and iran etc. are all dark - SCIENCE BITCH

you could gain instant credibility by saying "hey guys, this isn't a scam -- we're not promising cold fusion!" xp

to clarify I mean all the human behavior research at facebook - not all of facebook AND all of human behavior research. duh.

I used to follow all kinds of sociologists and human behavior ppl studying online interaction, social network structure, ad hoc hierarchies in the google reader days and I never got the impression anyone doing interesting work was actually at any of the large corps, and if they were, they ended up leaving when their research was curtailed

I think your explanation above plus the maze runner analogy does a great job explaining why anything interesting in those fields is NOT of interest to these firms - they might pay lip service, and maybe even real money for a while, but then it probably becomes quickly apparent that novel social science findings based on proprietary and un-publishable data aren't really useful to anyone - the scientist can't go to conferences except to lurk and the company can't do anything with it because uh sure so that's how we know people like or don't like something? lol we already KNEW THAT

of course I'm talking completely out the butt here so I would love for an actual social scientist / behavioral person at some big network to come correct my horrible assumptions but they're probably not allowed to