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Censorship By Glut
In a country where you're free to say almost anything in the political arena, I think the only real censorship of good ideas is what you could call "censorship by glut". If you had a brilliant, absolutely airtight argument that we should do something -- indict President Bush (or Barack Obama), or send foreign investment to Chechnya, or let kids vote -- but you weren't an established writer or well-known blogger, how much of a chance do you think your argument would have against the glut of Web rants and other pieces of writing out there? Especially if your argument required people to read it and think about it for at least an hour? Perhaps your situation could be compared to that of a brilliantly talented band submitting a song for Matthew Salganik's experiment.
What Salganik and his co-authors did was recruit users through advertisements on Bolt.com (skewing toward a teen demographic) to sign up for a free music download site. Users would be able to listen to full-length songs and then decide whether or not to download the song for free. Some users were randomly divided into eight artificial "worlds" in which, while a user was listening to a song, they could see the number of times that the song had been downloaded by other users in the same world -- but only by other users within their own world, not counting the downloads by users in other worlds. The test was to see whether certain songs could become popular in some worlds while languishing in others, despite the fact that all groups consisted of randomly assigned populations that all had equal access to the same songs. The experiment also attempted to measure the "merit" of individual songs by assigning some users to an "independent" group, where they could listen to songs and choose whether to download them, but without seeing the number of times the song had been downloaded by anyone else; the merit of the song was defined as the number of times that users in the independent group decided to download the song after listening to it. Experimenters looked at whether the merit of the song had any effect on the popularity levels it achieved in the eight other "worlds".
The authors summed it up: "In general, the 'best' songs never do very badly, and the 'worst' songs never do extremely well, but almost any other result is possible." They also noted that in the "social influence" worlds where users could see each others' downloads, increasing download numbers had a snowball effect that widened the difference between the successful songs and the unsuccessful: "We found that all eight social influence worlds exhibit greater inequality -- meaning popular songs are more popular and unpopular songs are less popular -- than the world in which individuals make decisions independently." Figures 3(A) and 3(C) in the paper show that the relationship between a song's merit and its success in any given world -- while not completely random -- is tenuous. And if you're a talented musician and you want to get really depressed about your prospects of hitting the big time, Figures 3(B) and 3(D) show the relationship between a song's measured merit and its actual number of sales in the real world. (Although those graphs may cheer you up if you're a struggling musician who hasn't made it big yet -- maybe it's not you, it's just the roll of the dice.)
As the Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein put it in their all-around fascinating book Nudge , where I first read about the Salganik study:
In many domains people are tempted to think, after the fact, that an outcome was entirely predictable, and that the success of a musician, an actor, an author, or a politician was inevitable in light of his or her skills and characteristics. Beware of that temptation. Small interventions and even coincidences, at a key stage, can produce large variations in the outcome. Today's hot singer is probably indistinguishable from dozens and even hundreds of equally talented performers whose names you've never heard. We can go further. Most of today's governors are hard to distinguish from dozens or even hundreds of politicians whose candidacies badly fizzled.
Is the blogosphere, or the "marketplace of ideas" in general, any different? If a random
sample of bloggers were rated based on some independent measure of merit -- for example, independent
ratings from a random sampling of blog readers, who were looking at the bloggers' writing samples
for the first time, analogous to users in Salganik's "independent" world --
and then correlate that with the bloggers' traffic or some other measure of success,
it's not hard to imagine the results would be similar to those of the 8-worlds
experiment: the best often rise to the top, the very worst rarely do, but success in the vast middle
would be close to random. In fact, while music listeners would have no logical reason to
like a song just because others did, users in the blogosphere and other public forums
would have several rational reasons to cluster around writers who are
already popular: (1) errors are more likely to have been spotted and pointed out by someone else;
(2) as an extension of that, others are more likely to have provided comments and other value-added content;
(3) if you are the first person to spot an error, it's more important on a popular blog
to point out the error and stop the misinformation from spreading, than on a minor blog that nobody
has ever heard of. So the "snowball effect" of popularity in the blogosphere would be even more
pronounced.
Then why do so many people believe in what Thaler and Sunstein call the "inevitability" of
success based on merit, in domains like music, politics, and writing? I think it's because the belief
is what scientists call an unfalsifiable one -- if the "best" acts are assumed to be the
ones that end up on the top of the pile, then the marketplace has always sorted the "best" content
to the top, by definition. Since the definition is circular,
the premise could never be disproved by any amount
of counter-evidence -- even if an act that used to be popular, suddenly falls under the radar, that
could be seen as "proof" that they lost whatever magic touch they used to have, not as evidence of
the arbitrariness of the market! The only disproof
would be an artificial experiment like Salganik's, showing that once you get beyond a certain
threshold of quality, commercial success has little relationship to independently measured merit --
but such experiments, which in Salganik's case required the cooperation of over 14,000 users,
don't come along very often. And as long as most people don't realize how arbitrary the existing
marketplaces are, there isn't enough demand to justify building a system that could work better --
indeed, to even justify
asking the question of whether a system could be designed that would work better.
And that, I think, is how "censorship by glut" really works. It's not just the sheer amount
of written content that censors small voices -- if you happen to know about a particular writer that
you consider a fount of wisdom, then the existence of a billion other Web pages won't stop you from
reading that writer's content. And it's not as if there aren't plenty of people who realize
that success can be highly arbitrary.
The problem is that as long as most people assume that the existing marketplace of ideas
does a good job of sorting
the best content to the top, then they'll be more inclined to stay with the most popular news sites
and blogs, and even the minority who know that it's largely a lottery, will have no effective
way of finding the best content among everything else, so they'll end up sticking with the most popular
sites as well.
Worse, as a secondary effect,
most people with something useful to contribute won't even bother, if they don't already have
a large built-in audience. I know
plenty of people who could write insightful essays about social and technological issues, essays
that would give most readers a new perspective such that they would definitely say afterwards: "That
was worth my time to read it." But it
wouldn't be worth it to the writers, because they know that their content isn't going to get
magically sorted
into its deserved place in the hierarchy.
(My own favorite blog that nobody's ever heard of is Seth Finkelstein's
InfoThought, which is usually
logical and insightful and is only about 25% of the time
about how "nobody ever reads this blog, so what's
the point".
His Guardian columns
are also good and usually don't have that subtext, perhaps because it's considered impolite to use
a newspaper's column-inches
(column-centimeters?)
to complain that you have no voice.)
So can this problem be avoided, or is inequality and arbitrariness just a permanent part of the marketplace
for content and ideas? You could create an artificial world that would sort user-submitted content according
to some other algorithm -- and even if it didn't give good writers the fame that they theoretically deserved
in the larger world,
it might still provide them with enough of an audience within the artificial universe, to make it worth their
time to keep writing. One
option would be to use Salganik's "independence" world model, where users would read content without
being able to see the ratings that other people had given to it, or without even seeing recommendations from
similarly-minded friends within the system. The trouble is that without any information about
what other readers liked, without any starting point to sort good content from bad content, it may not be
worth the reader's time to read through all the dreck to find the occasional buried treasure. I believe
about as strongly as a person can believe, that the existing marketplace for content is far from meritocratic,
for example that there are probably thousands of songs on iTunes that I've never
heard of but would nonetheless love --
but even I don't spend time listening to the 30-second clips of random songs on iTunes, because it takes too
long to find the stuff I would like.
But I submit there is a solution -- a variant of an argument that I've suggested for
stopping
cheating on Digg, or building Wikia search into a
meritocratic search engine, or helping
the best writers
rise to the top
on Google Knol. The solution is sorting based on ratings from a random
sample of users. The remainder of this speculation will be very theoretical, and will at times seem
like a Rube-Goldberg approach to what should be a simple problem. But at each juncture, the complications
to the algorithm are motivated by an argument that anything simpler would not work. At many points along
the way, it will be tempting to throw up one's hands and say, "Why go to all this trouble, the existing
system works well enough." But this statement is hard to quantify with any actual evidence -- unless
you're just using the circular definition above, that whatever rises to the top is automatically the "best".
For music listeners, the gist of the algorithm is: When an artist submits a new song
in the alt-rock category for example, the song is distributed to a random sample of 20 users who
have indicated an interest in that genre. If the average rating from those users is high enough, the
song gets recommended to all of the site's users who are interested in alt-rock. If the average rating
is not high enough, then the artist receives a notification, perhaps with a list of comments from the listeners
suggesting what to improve. As long as the initial random sample of users is large enough that the average
rating is indicative of what the rest of the site's alt-rock fans would think, the good content will get
to be enjoyed by all of the site's alt-rock customers, while the bad content would fizzle after only wasting
the time of 20 people. If it turns out that a random selection of 20 users are typically too lazy to rate
the songs that are submitted to them, you could even make artists submit $10 to have their songs rated by
the focus group, and pay each of the 20 raters $0.50 each for their trouble. Artists can't withhold payment
as revenge for a bad rating, so the average ratings should still be proportional to the song's actual quality.
At this point, you might object that this system suffers from the same unfalsifiable, circular reasoning
as the belief
that the marketplace rewards the "best" content, if the best content is the content that wins in the marketplace.
If I define the "best" content to be the content
that gets the highest average score in a random focus group, then of course this algorithm sorts the best
content to the top, because that's how "best" was defined! But this system does actually have a non-trivial
property: If you implement the system in multiple separate "worlds" (similar to those that Salganik created), then
provided your focus groups are large enough to provide representative random samples, the same content should
rise
to the top in each of the worlds, unlike the results in Salganik's experiment.
This actually wouldn't
be the case if the initial focus groups were not big enough -- then random variations in a few voters' opinions
could cause many songs to succeed in one world and fail in another.
So it's a non-trivial property that is not automatically true, and would not be true if you made an error
in designing the system, like making the focus groups too small.
But the larger the size of the random
sample, the smaller the variance in the expected value of the average of their ratings, and the greater
agreement you would expect between the results from different worlds.
As Salganik pointed out to me, this system does under-reward songs that might require repeated listenings over
time to gain an appreciation of their qualities. But even this, strictly speaking, can be modeled in exchange
for cash -- I'll pay 20 users $2 each if they listen to my song once today, once in three days, and once
again a week after that (the site could stream the song to them to provide at least some likelihood that the
users weren't cheating). This assumes some things, such as that repeated exposure has the same
growing-on-you effect even if the exposure is forced -- but in the real world,
songs often grow on you from repeated listenings
that are "forced" anyway, if they're played in the doctor's office or on the radio when you don't bother to
change the channel. And this might be more complicated than necessary -- often when a song grows on you,
it at least interests you enough the first time you hear it, that you'd give it a positive rating on the first
listen, which is all that the site requires for the song's success.
However, if you try to adapt this trick to a meritocracy for written content, you run into different problems.
With a song, if you poll a random sample of users, the odds are very small that anyone being polled will be
a vested interest in the success of the song, like one of the band members or one of the song's producers
(assuming the population of users is large enough, and the song's
producers have not been able to create a huge number of
"sockpuppet"
accounts to manipulate the voting).
So you can assume the ratings will be free of any prior bias.
But with a political post, for example, if you write a
pro-Bush or anti-Bush essay, it's quite likely that among a random sample of users, there will be
people who are biased
to vote up (or vote down) any post that has anything good to say about the President. The essays
voted to the top may not be the best-written ones, but simply the ones that pander to the most popularly held
opinions.
But if the "best" essays are not the ones that receive the highest percentage of positive votes, even
when polling a random sample of independent users -- which I was advocating as the gold standard for measuring
merit -- then how do you define what makes the "best" essays, anyway? There are many possible answers, but
I suggest: A necessary condition for being among the "best" essays would be to convince the most people
of something that they didn't believe before,
without resorting to tricks such as blatantly fabricating statistics or attributing made-up quotes.
This is not a sufficient condition for merit -- maybe the point of view that you're convincing people
of, is still wrong -- but I submit that if you're not at least changing some people's minds, then there's no point.
An essay that changes a lot of people's minds in a random focus group, is usually worth reading, if
only to see why it has that effect.
Unfortunately, this doesn't suggest a better way to poll users about the merit of an essay, because if you
ask users, "Were you a Bush supporter before reading this essay?" and "Were you a Bush supporter afterwards?",
Bush supporters are eventually going to figure out that the way to give the essay a high score on the
mind-changing scale, would be to (falsely) say that they were not a Bush supporter before reading the essay,
but they were one afterwards. So you'd still end up rewarding the essays that reinforce pre-existing opinions
instead of the ones that change people's minds.
From here the counter-measures and counter-counter-measures get increasingly complicated.
For each category of essays that a user
wants to rate, such as Bush opinion pieces, you could require new users to enter their current opinion:
either pro-Bush or anti-Bush. Then if they were asked to rate a pro-Bush essay, they would only be able
to vote that the essay "changed their minds" by switching their registered opinion from "anti-Bush" to
"pro-Bush". But Bush supporters could sign up initially as anti-Bush, just in the hopes of being part of a
random focus group so they could cast their mind-changing vote for a Bush essay by changing their registration
to "pro-Bush"! However, each user would only be able to do that once -- or do you allow users, after they've
switched from anti-Bush to pro-Bush, to "reload" by spontaneously switching back to anti-Bush for no reason
at all, so they're all set to cast a mind-changing vote for the next pro-Bush essay? Or
would they only be allowed to switch back to anti-Bush, by casting a mind-changing vote as part of a random focus
group for an anti-Bush essay -- thus giving a boost to an anti-Bush screed, as part of the price they pay for
the next vote they cast for a pro-Bush piece? Then users could still game the system, by switching to
"anti-Bush" when casting a vote for a very poorly written anti-Bush essay that they don't think
anybody else will vote for anyway,
and then switching back to "pro-Bush" only for the good essays that have a shot, hoping that their votes
will coalesce around the decently-written pro-Bush essays and push them to the front page...
Am I over-thinking this? I submit this is an area where there's been too much under-thinking.
Haven't we all been tempted to believe that the marketplace of ideas -- not to mention bands, blog posts,
and business ventures -- efficiently sorts content to the place in the hierarchy of rewards that it deserves,
without having any real evidence for this, except the circular definition of "quality" as being proportional
to success? And the more people believe this, the more that marginalized voices will effectively be censored,
even when they have something brilliant to contribute. We should at least think about ways that we could
do better. Or else, prove logically that it can't be done (a logical proof can only approximate the real world,
but it could show that such a pure meritocracy would be very improbable, or wouldn't work well). However I think
the ideas above make it seem unlikely that a meritocracy is logically impossible. Maybe they're a step in the
right direction. Maybe someone else's ideas would be better. The important thing is that
a meritocratic algorithm be judged
by something other than a circular definition, which simply decrees by fiat that the winning content is
the best.
I attribute the popularity of people like Ann Coulter - and networks like Fox News - to the fact there is a huge segment of the population that doesn't watch TV or log onto the internet to become informed ... they seek out information that validates their already-existing view of the world. Actual facts and truth might require a painful rewiring of preconceived notions.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Basically, you do what you think others want you to do. This... this is not news.
However, it's good to see it being properly analyzed. I'll need at least an hour to think about this.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
I'm sure we'll see a million of these posts.
Go ahead, mod me down. Fascists!
Whale
*thinks back to story yesterday*
Please help metamoderate.
slashdot moderation much?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
...such as declining quality - such as with laptops, where display technology has gone backward from S-IPS to age-old TN even though there were more than enough willing to pay for it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It would appear that people are actually sheeps. ...
Wait, how is that news?
censorship
a: the institution, system, or practice of censoring
b: the actions or practices of censors ; especially : censorial control exercised repressively
Which is not the same thing as people going with the flow, and acting like the rather lazy pack/herd animals that hundreds of millions of years of evolution has wired up.
Having a great idea that you express below the Signal-to-Noise threshold is not the same as being censored.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...was how George Saunders put it in a good essay of that name.
But it seems like the real problem he's trying to solve is that current ranking algorithms don't take into effect the fact that "users" are not one segment, but rather composed of different segments with differing political, religious, sexual, ethnic, etc. tastes. That is to say, Digg's algorithms are very good if you match a stereotypical Digg profile. If you weren't, well, it wasn't so amazing.
However, this is _hardly_ an unexplored area, and I would further submit that _Amazon_ is surprisingly good at this kind of thing. By analyzing what random samples of users bought (or, in other cases, ranked up or down), they're able to make (IMHO) often-insightful recommendations about what else you should buy. I've had thoughts about how you could make a site that would kick Digg's ass and probably be more valuable to advertisers using tagging, ranking, and some statistics, too.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
The failure of a group of people to communicate well does not constitute "censorship". Censorship is when someone or something selects communications for suppression. But when a room is too noisy for someone to be heard, that's not censorship. Unless a person or a group of people arranges for rooms to be noisy, with the plan to drown out some people.
If the "censorship" is selective only of arbitrary communications, not according to content or meaning, but only according to signal strength or random chance, that's not "censorship". It should be fixed, but calling it "censorship" just makes it harder to deal with actual censorship.
We have loads and loads of actual censorship, especially on the Internet. We should care about stopping censorship. So we shouldn't just call any failure to communicate "censorship", which makes it harder to communicate about censorship or the other interference, and therefore harder to fix either.
--
make install -not war
See Charlie Johnson at LGF and his corner of the web. Not only is it censorship by glut, it's also a feature complete echo chamber. No genuine dissent gets in or out.
Of course, here might be the counter proof. However, the behavior of the original is still the same.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Why is the OpenGL Utility Toolkit involved in censorship?
Success in the middle range of quality is random. I like this conclusion. It supports my elitist view in which the middle is already trash. I find my preconceptions are confirmed once again.
The premise as posed in the headline is surely true. You have censored the content of your article due to the shear glut of text included. Who will read all that?
and the US, and watched the evening news - you definitely get a feel that the evening news in America is censored. This is not so much because the hide stories, but just the lack of airtime for most anything worthwhile, while fluff (Arnette's cat gets in a tree and rescued by firefighter, college sports) dominates. International events don't tend to be covered at all, unless it is really grand or some type of American involvement (1000 people die, including 12 American, etc).
Now, I don't think this is a grand conspiracy, but it does have a dumbing down effect - I don't know if it came about because of viewer demand or a few program managers dictating what gets broadcast and other stations imitating them. In the evening news in Canada, UK, France, Germany (countries I personally traveled to) - there is definitely more awareness of what is going in internationally (or even nationally).
"Popular people get noticed. Unpopular people don't. Sorry if you're in the second group."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There is a certain cliquishness at work in the blogosphere. For example, many of the major bloggers are fairly mediocre writers just like most editorialists fit that mold. There is a feedback effect of the back-and-forth referencing that makes them seem more relevant and better than they really are.
If I had to give one piece of advice to someone that wanted to start blogging today, it would be to simply write for your own enjoyment while making sure that what you write may be beneficial to others if they run across it. Why? Chances are, you won't ever get popular even if you are really good at it. The flaw in the Army of Davids model used to describe publishing content online is that David was very unique, and most people simply aren't that. Even when they are, they're not annointed like David.
I suppose the one thing I'll never understand is why people continue to give a platform to writers like Bill Kristol. There are a lot of them who are just flat out wrong so often that I can't help but think they're a lot like a horoscope, but for politics.
Wow, when will we ever get this? The lower wattage bulb comment is obviously flamebait. We get dupe's (redundant) stories all the time. This is a feature /. needs. I want to browse the frontpage with my story threshold at 2.
Yeah, I know we can pick catagories, but that's not what I'm looking for.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Rank the users also.
That is, someone that has an account for 4 years and been "Pro-Bush" all that time carries full voting rights of say 100 shares. But when you first sign up or switch votes to anti-bush, suddenly you go back to having '1 share', doubling to 2 in a month, 4 in 3 months, 8 in 6 months, 12 in a year, 24 in 18 months, 48 in 2 years, 100 in 4 years.
But with regards to the general idea, Amazon/Netflix already beats your base idea.
That is, they use a bayesian probability formula to say that people that like X will also like Y, thereby recommending things to you.
Maybe I'm blind, but I see zero advantage to the article's idea of having people pick their own 'groupings' instead of letting the bayseian formula deal with it.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. One of the chapters in this excellent book concerns a topic called "social proof". That chapter provides a lot of insight into this issue.
It's the best example of network effect in action. This is also why we have a long way before "the year of linux desktop".
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
My friends and I call this "Social Proof"
in a nutshell:
Partially due to our fast paced society(or perhaps amplified by it) people cannot take the time to learn about and judge things or people for themselves, so they use social indicators to determine worth.
For example, seeing a well dressed well groomed individual vs their unkempt shabbily dressed twin. People tend to assume much better things about the well dressed twin simply by manner of his appearance.
Another example, if you go out for drinks with an attractive coworker or friend of the opposite sex and the two of you are seen laughing and joking and having fun, your social value is increased in the eyes of the onlookers, they figure if this other person has taken the time to form a positive opinion of you, then you must have some desirable qualities, and they will be more receptive of your attention. This seems to be a mostly subconscious effect.
Before I got married, I used to have several hot chicks that I would go party with, knowing that being out with a hot chick made it easier to pick up other chicks.
People tend to be sheep.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
What if Google's role in skewing the popularity curve has had a real impact on the public's opinions on doing research? Other web companies also contribute to the flattening of available content, and it is a real problem if we don't find better ways to distribute stuff at random.
I dislike the music example because I think songs should be able to find their audience, even if it means being heard by the only person who can convince his friends to tell their friends to buy it (or by one of the hundred people who could). And registering as pro- or anti- on high-level topics, I feel, pushes people to make the decision far earlier than necessary, biasing them needlessly. However, a broader psychological screening could be a very promising background against which to measure the bias in evaluation of writing.
(If it were about slashdot comments, would there have been a link to goatse?)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
what is posed as a philosophical breakthrough is simply nothing more than not understandning the goddamn meaning of the word "censorship"
a high noise to signal ratio is not the same thing as censorship
that's some pretty fruitless philosophical gymnastics there son
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The definition of censorship above depends on the definition of a censor, the 4th definition below satisfies the use in the article.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
1 definition(s) found
Censor \Cen"sor\, n. [L. censor, fr. censere to value, tax.]
1. (Antiq.) One of two magistrates of Rome who took a
register of the number and property of citizens, and who
also exercised the office of inspector of morals and
conduct.
2. One who is empowered to examine manuscripts before they
are committed to the press, and to forbid their
publication if they contain anything obnoxious; -- an
official in some European countries.
3. One given to fault-finding; a censurer.
Nor can the most circumspect attention, or steady
rectitude, escape blame from censors who have no
inclination to approve. --Rambler.
4. A critic; a reviewer.
Received with caution by the censors of the press.
--W. Irving.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
"they seek out information that validates their already-existing view of the world. Actual facts and truth might require a painful rewiring of preconceived notions."
The exact same thing can truthfully be said of all religions, but very often the Atheist point of view is voted down to suppress it.
This validates their already-existing view of the world, and painful rewiring of preconceived notions, also explains the origin of religions in the first place and how misconceptions and myths grow over time.
Religions often teach followers to suppress opposing points of view. They think they are right, refuse to hear they can be wrong, and so don't want to listen to any other point of view. They teach closemindedness.
I was thinking the same thing! It's a giant convoluted system to determine what he "thinks" is the best in some area. The notion of "success" in general seems to be very subjective.
I also take issue with the theme of self-censorship that was mentioned in the article. IF someone truly believes they have an insightful commentary or viewpoint, why would they *not* publish it, regardless of their potential audience? You're telling me musicians wouldn't make music, or essayists would write because of a perceived lack of audience? So what? I was under the impression that those who innovatively create do so primarily for their own fulfillment, not to get the most eyeballs on Digg or the most downloads on iTunes.
We can go further. Most of today's governors are hard to distinguish from dozens or even hundreds of politicians whose candidacies badly fizzled.
Sarah Palin explained!
That is all.
(Please mod this comment up.)
There's nothing you have that they can't take away: Absolute zero, Gentle Jack, bottom line.
Theres me wondering what the OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) has to do with censorship.
Slashdot is the worst, since my comments never rise above zero.
Anne Coulter just made a buttload of ad money.
Thanks slashdot.
The Slashdot comments system is a spot-on example of what Haselton describes: if one doesn't manage First Post or relatively close to it, the likelihood that your insightful/informative/funny comment will be widely read and modded-up decreases proportionately. People just don't have the time or stamina to read hundreds of comments, normally; they read just the first few dozen "visible" (highly rated) ones and then quit. If in fact that is the case, then being late to the party means that the quality of your comment is irrelevant because it will be drowned-out by the flood that preceded it. Really it's the people who are able to jump in and suck on the Firehose that get most of the attention here. I've been frustrated by this quantitative factor - what Haselton calls the "glut" - for a long time.
My idea goes in two stages: in stage one, a new user can only indicate whether they agree or disagree with a comment. Once the system can, by comparison with other users, determine with some certainty what a user will agree with, they then can instead indicate how well-written (or compelling or convincing) those comments are. The trick is users are not shown low-rated dissenting opinions, only the most highly-rated; and when a reply is made, again, it will only make it back to the dissenting camp if it is highly-rated.
The idea is to weed-out the flame-warriors and troll-feeders, to cut through the glut, and get the really interesting ideas in front of people, which is how it's similar to this.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
This is an exceptionally pernicious metaphor. We do often prefer one idea to another, but a market does not exist. One idea is right and one is wrong and the choice is usually a false one. Choosing what others have chosen is a CYA tactic and not a way to conduct one's intellectual life. This result demonstrates man the social animal impeding man the rational animal.
These are not new problems and are not limited to democracies of taste or meritocratic capitalism. One of the more interesting results was the *new band* question. Participant is asked if they had heard of these four new bands, one of which was spurious. The profile of recognition was statistically identical to that for the three real, but little known, new bands. Respondents need to be seen as knowing, whether they have actual knowledge or not. This makes clear that musical taste as a function of personal identity formation and not music appreciation. The big labels have know this for years: it doesn't matter who you front as long as you flood the airwaves and hype the sucker.
That said, there are a handful of people in all times and places who do not consider themselves tied to their peer's taste; who strive to think for themselves. They usually have unique access to actual ideas. They are often shunned by their peers because they call into question the intellectual shorthand everyone else contents themselves with. They are either crackpots or geniuses, sometimes both. One thing they never are is boring.
illegitimii non ingravare
Wake the fuck up. We live in a country where your purchases of cold medicine are tracked and recorded, where YOU are called a dead-beat by the very same credit card companies you are helping to "bail out", and where we have the highest per-capita rate of imprisonment on the planet.
Free to work ourselves into an early grave, consume as much as possible, and pay taxes the entire way. Not too free beyond that.
It seems to be the comments on this article, are in fact confirming what the article says.
In answer to the question about how to rate blog essays, I suggest that we need to rate the raters. How do we do that? I think a system can be built into the threads of discussion in response to an essay. If people rate your comment highly, it increases your standing as a rater, and your ratings figure more strongly into the rating metric. But people can't just rate. They must also supply, in the form of a comment, their reasoning behind the rating, which opens their comment and rating to responding comments and ratings, and so on. If people read and understand the terms of comment submission so they know that the point of the site is to rate the quality of reasoning, not the flavor of ideology, the system should correct itself.
Then again, this system assumes that people will behave rationally, which is dubious, as any economist or divorce lawyer will tell you.
This still doesn't explain the popularity of boy bands or reality shows, and we all know where those lay in the scale of merit.
While I admit I haven't spent nearly as much time thinking or writing about this as Haselton has (he seems to have a great deal of time), I do like this paragraph particularly:
And that, I think, is how "censorship by glut" really works. It's not just the sheer amount of written content that censors small voices -- if you happen to know about a particular writer that you consider a fount of wisdom, then the existence of a billion other Web pages won't stop you from reading that writer's content. And it's not as if there aren't plenty of people who realize that success can be highly arbitrary. The problem is that as long as most people assume that the existing marketplace of ideas does a good job of sorting the best content to the top, then they'll be more inclined to stay with the most popular news sites and blogs, and even the minority who know that it's largely a lottery, will have no effective way of finding the best content among everything else, so they'll end up sticking with the most popular sites as well. Worse, as a secondary effect, most people with something useful to contribute won't even bother, if they don't already have a large built-in audience. I know plenty of people who could write insightful essays about social and technological issues, essays that would give most readers a new perspective such that they would definitely say afterwards: "That was worth my time to read it." But it wouldn't be worth it to the writers, because they know that their content isn't going to get magically sorted into its deserved place in the hierarchy.
I agree that there seems to be a lot of mob mentality and snowballing in Internet writing, but I think there are some external factors that are left out of his analysis. I think that the large chunk of people who 'can't be bothered' to contribute don't contribute because they have a personally successful life. I know it's gross stereotyping, but it seems as though the bulk of people who spend their time spouting ideals (Communists, OSS giants, pop stars, Obama) have done little to none of what society considers real work. These people have far more free time than personally ambitious, hardworking people who pursue personal success instead of a career in changing the world. Thus, these people who have too much time on their hands distort the written contents of the net. (Please keep in mind that this is a draft of a 5-minute theory, so it's sure to have some holes.)
As far as remedies go, I think rating algorithms need to be much more sophisticated. For example, 5-star scales could calculate the rating based on the mean of the mode star and its two neighbors' frequencies.
For simplicity, let's assume one person clicked 1, two people clicked 2, three people clicked 3, etc. This method would discard stars 1-3 and calculate a display rating of 4.5, instead of a simple mean of 3.6. By totally discarding far-out ratings, we might be able to keep ratings from all gravitating to the middle. This is another 5-minute theory, and I'm not a math whiz, so I'm sure there's a better/simpler way to implement a deviation scheme like this, but it's a thought.
Hmm, for added fun, try taking ALL ratings in a database and adjusting them all on a curve! But that's liable to guzzle server resources...
The government can't save you.
Given the size of the summary, I think I would need at least a few hours to read the article itself. Maybe this is intended as an example on how ideas can be submerged in a glut of information?
I wonder what would happen if Slashdot were to turn antichronological... suddenly, for all users, the newest post is at the top, with moderation threshold effects as per usual. By the way, I tend to browse without threshold, and rely on scimming. Why? Because AC's start with a low moderation score and will therefore (usually) not get modded up, regardless of the quality, because no one actually gets to see the comment in the first place. But this means that interesting comments I want to read are invisible unless I turn the threshold off. Now, I know that AC's start lower to encourage people to sign in, but some people people like their privacy, or don't want to login in every forum they just want to leave a comment. Anyway, for me as someone who mostly just reads, Slashdots moderation system is terribly broken, after all it isn't like the logged-in regulars never troll, or beat down the usual well trodden roads, etc. and I don't have any control over whether other people log in or not. If Slashdot's moderation system were truly about letting the best posts bubble to the top, this would have been fixed by now, but as mentioned it's more like an incentive to log in (although I don't know if it actually works).
People has been suppressing alternative views since the beginning of time. Heck, even animals will eject non-conformists from the herd.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"Censorship" (for lack of a better word) is occuring not due to the innane mob network effect of the masses, but is the fault of the ranking algorithm.
Come up with a better algorithm and merit will be more accurately and "fairly" distributed. Of course, there are a lot of related stories out there, something like the Netflix competition may produce a better algorithm, although it may end up being too damn complicated.
I see this more as a math/engineering story; you can complain about the behavior of mobs, or you can fix it with math.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
If this submission didn't have 100 replies, I wouldn't be reading it.
You are only allowed to rate a song if you haven't looked at the current rating for the song. Ratings are only available after a threshold. Unfortunately, this means that you would be subject to listening to a lot of crap, if you want your opinion heard. Or, in Slashdot terms, you are only allowed to moderate responses in a story if you browse with moderation hidden.
In 2nd grade we did "surveys and graphs" on juice preferences. While most kids followed the assignment (asking favorite juce and then marking it down) I added another column based on my observations, because half the kids I asked asked me "which one is winning" and then chose whatever I told them was winning as their favorite. The drive to conform exists in social animals. And as Steve-o (not fron jackass) learned of punky clothing in "SLC Punk"... It's just another uniform.
Read (or watch the documentary adaptation: Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media) Manufacturing Consent for a deep analysis of this phenomenon -- or at least a parallel one: people tend to reinforce the "propaganda model" -- simply because in order to "float to the top" one has to support dominant/accepted (propaganda-inspired) views and positions in the "media system" -- which are those views that can be expressed as sound-bites -- or risk staying below the "noise floor" -- and thus unpopular or controversial views, even when true or innovative, tend to evaporate -- and so even the most progressive and intelligent commentators tend to support the status-quo, despite their own best intentions.
Does not imply the right to be heard. That's the difference. Censorship is when the government says "No, you can't say that." It is when they restrict you from being able to express what you want to express.
However, just because you want to express something, doesn't mean anyone is required to listen. If people wish to ignore you, they are free to do so. To have it any other way would be to infringe on their rights. If you tell me I have to listen to someone, and especially if you tell me I have to agree with what they say, well then you are infringing on my rights. Me choosing not to listen isn't censorship, and isn't even remotely the same thing.
You have the right to stand around and yell whatever you want, but you don't have the right to do it in my living room.
Slashdot is a clear example of the Salganik effect. Watch as some random post gets modded +5 insightful, not because its any more insightful than the next post, but because some moderator gave it +1 and it just snowballed from there.
1) by the same mechanism described in the article, raters will be randomly rated highly or overlooked.
2) highly rated raters will age and slowly lose touch with what is relevant. Their rater rating will fail to reflect this. You see this with current arbiters of popular culture.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
Excuse me if this seems to ramble.
I once read an article about Rating systems, ones that were resistant to gaming the system, unlike eBay's rating system. The system in questions rated things positively that you rated highly and negatively those that you didn't. Over time it tended to only show you things that were rated highly by people who rated things similarly to you.
This leads to clustering of people with similar viewpoints, but lessens the effect of sockpuppets, trolls and griefers. They would have to be rated positively by enough people consistently in the same cluster to game the system.
I wasn't looking at this for something like eBay, but rather an MMO. I also wonder sometimes about a Firefox plugin, but I digress.
I'd like to further refine this system based on my experience with Amazon's recommendations. I and some of my friends have noticed if we buy a very new or niche publication we will get wierd and uneven recommendations off that purchase until enough people buy the book to smooth out the recommendations.
Unfortunately Amazon only has "I own this" and "not interested" as responses. It doesn't have enough dimensions, and doesn't factor in reviews at all. I buy one video in a series, and I get recommendations for that series, and other series that are similar. When I say I am not interested in that other series episodes, say season 1 I still get recommendations for the rest of the series. I would like to be able to 'deny all' but I can't. If I wanted to tell it not to recommend horror movies, I can't.
Likewise if I saw something online I didn't want to read, and I consistently didn't like, I'd filter it, not one blog post, but the author.
Ok, so here I am ideally, rating things and filtering things, until I am at last, as the parent writes in my own "world" suddenly CNN, BBC, and Joe blogger have an equal voice because they are narrowcasting straight to my own little insular 'bubble' on the internet.
To which I'd like to add we need more control, and more dimensions on this filtering thing if it's really supposed to work. I'd love to mod up stories 'Thought-Provoking', or 'I want my 5 minutes back'.
I think there is an answer out there, and I think it has something to do with self-organizing systems.
You've obviously never been to Slashdot before.
I think Ann is funny, and in an era of political correctness, one of the bravest commentators out there. She's a lot of things, but dumb isn't one of them. I'm disappointed that ad hominem attacks have made it to article submissions now.
I guess I am just one of those dumb Fox News drones, one with a doctorate. But I consider Ann Coulter a guilty pleasure, the political equivalent of cheesecake.
Interesting thing about those who just dismiss Ann. I read a commentator in the UK saying that in America, you can just call someone a moonbat or netroot and that's the end of it. But in the UK, you'd actually have to address what she says with debate and criticism beyond the mere ad hominem.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Why?
I have in my own post about recommendation systems mentioned something I read about a system that is resistant to gaming. can't remember the URL though.
Is gaming of the systems why you don't trust these systems? Your comment isn't really a comment, I could just as easily say "don't trust Tom" without some reasoning, I don't think most folks would listen to me.
Are voting systems in your experience all sock puppets and popularity contests?
Had you provided me a reason I might have modded you up.
If you had a brilliant, absolutely airtight argument that we should do something -- indict President Bush (or Barack Obama), or send foreign investment to Chechnya, or let kids vote.
Those are all singularly stupid ideas, not brilliant.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I think you missed the sarcasm/irony of the original post... If I really felt that those systems were untrustworthy/useless/etc., why would I care about modding?
There's nothing you have that they can't take away: Absolute zero, Gentle Jack, bottom line.
Once again "Bennett Haselton", whom none of us care about, gets to use the front page of Slashdot as his personal blog. I don't know if he has incriminating pictures of CowboyNeal or what.
Tagged the article "ohnotitsbennett", I suggest you do the same.
D'oh
Fox News is willing to put some conservatives on the air so it gets an undeserved reputation as being a conservative network. Fox News only seems to support the right because it is being compared to the anti-conservative reports on the other news networks.
that's Emperor / Empress. A King / Queen is a step down, ruling a mere kingdom.
I wonder if he gets his facts from the storm troopers.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
It took me 6 full mouse scrolls to ignore TFS.
I wonder how many /. readers think of themselves as being a member of the "Merit" group instead of a member of the "Social" group because they (mistakenly?) believe that they aren't effected by hit counters since they don't consciously pay attention to them.
Taking it one step further, I wonder how many of the group above use that as personal validation that their opinions are "Correct" and everyone elses are "Wrong".
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Conservatives (Read: Classical Liberals)
Don't redefine the terms. Up to this point in the discussion, "conservative" has meant "modern American right-winger". (A "classical liberal" is really just a liberal who defies the silly liberal stereotype.)
Conservatives (right-wingers) are nothing like liberals (classical or not). The believe that people's speech should be regulated. There ought to be limits to freedom. Americans shouldn't criticize the president in a time of war. Americans should ignore the media and get all information straight from the government. The media should never criticize the government or impede its agenda in any way. Americans should not be allowed to see images of flag-draped coffins. All obscenity should be outlawed. Flag-burning is obscene and should be outlawed. The list goes on and on.
No, seriously. Haselton wants to tap into a wisdom-of-crowds effect to find the good stuff we're missing. So long as opinions are independent, many people do converge on the right answer more often than few people.
In the good old days, getting enough people to see or hear a piece of creative work was a logistical nightmare. Using the kind of "peer review" he's talking about would have been impossible, even though it's a really promising approach. But the web could make it easy. It's the same kind of quantum shift, with equally huge ramifications, as the way the printing press made ideas accessible to many more people than before.
Facilitating good ideas and making them visible pretty much defines a civilization. Finding a way to get good ideas known is about as non-trivial as it gets. Because even though developed countries have grown rather good at the facilitating part, we're still wasting 99% of our good people at the visibility end.
You may have noticed by now that good people are hard to find. It'd be like climbing out of the Middle Ages if we stopped wasting 99% of them.
tl/dr.
But in all seriousness...
the only real censorship of good ideas is what you could call "censorship by glut". If you had a brilliant, absolutely airtight argument that we should do something -- indict President Bush (or Barack Obama), or send foreign investment to Chechnya, or let kids vote -- but you weren't an established writer or well-known blogger, how much of a chance do you think your argument would have against the glut of Web rants and other pieces of writing out there? Especially if your argument required people to read it and think about it for at least an hour?
This is slashdot, for crying out loud! ... the land of armchair generals, amateur lawyers, and anonymous cowards!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
feel free to improve my analogy by picking a more liberal talk show shock jockey. I don't listen to any of them Limbaugh or stern anymore. I also avoid opera and 'dr.' Phil. Maybe one of them would be a better choice. I suspect the main premise of the statement remains unchanged regardless of the concrete examples of polarizing emotion driven commentators you choose to represent opposite ends of the spectrum.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Wow, that was an awesome article!
I have been thinking about the same problem for a little while, and have some comments on some of the stuff he proposed.
It doesn't surprise me at all that Salganik's experiment showed that popular songs would become more popular, almost regardless of their quality. This seems to be a hard-wired human character trait, to conform to popular opinion, even if contradicts direct observation (see the Asch conformity experiments or the No soap, radio jokes). I think that any "solution" to this problem is likely to be fighting a losing battle against peer pressure, since people will likely try to subvert the "find the merit" process in order to figure out what the group thinks.
On the topic of solving the problem of pre-existing bias, I say, "why bother?" He proposes a number of increasingly complex (though well-thought-out) solutions to the "Pro-Bush, Anti-Bush" article problem, all of which, I think, would be doomed to failure. This seems to be a cat-and-mouse game of "outsmart the rater" which I think the creator of the system would lose. If you try to make a smarter process of preventing people from injecting their bias into an article, they will just figure out a way around it. Rather than trying to outsmart the reader, simply include their bias in the rating of the article.
If you saw an article with a rating that said "95% of Bush supporters liked this article," it would tell you something about it, as would "90% of Kerry supporters also liked this article." You could rely on self-reporting or fancy statistical extraction of preferences to figure out who is a "Bush supporter" and who is a "Kerry supporter." That way, you wouldn't have to trick people into anything.
Additionally, who says something is an important part of what is being said. If you see an article about how 9/11 was a conspiracy by a well-known Truther, that is a very different piece of information than if President Bush says it. Likewise, a heavy metal fanatic liking a heavy metal song sends a different message than someone who thinks Vivaldi is just a young upstart and a passing fad liking the same song.
There could be problems with this (like how to keep the display of who said what short enough to be comprehensible), but it could be a step in the right direction, or at least something interesting to think about.
It is a different form of censorship. Case-in-point: when the US government doesn't want news cameras filming caskets coming back from Iraq, they flood the news with irrelevant details about every battle fought in every small town in the middle east, so that Iraq reporters are too busy reporting on those stories to report on the number of dead soldiers on the US side. Nobody is physically stopping the media from showing those caskets, they are just giving them apparently "juicier" stories that they either have to take or be the only news network that is not reporting the story.
Palm trees and 8
Book reviewers. Film reviewers. Art reviewers. Journal editors. Newspaper editors. Music reviewers. People with skill and training who act as a filter for you. Communities which flourish online reviewing for each other. Scientific peer review. This towards one end of the meritocratic spectrum, the top forty hit parade towards the other. An interesting and thought provoking piece.
I think that the large chunk of people who 'can't be bothered' to contribute don't contribute because they have a personally successful life. I know it's gross stereotyping, but it seems as though the bulk of people who spend their time spouting ideals (Communists, OSS giants, pop stars, Obama) have done little to none of what society considers real work. These people have far more free time than personally ambitious, hardworking people who pursue personal success instead of a career in changing the world. Thus, these people who have too much time on their hands distort the written contents of the net. (Please keep in mind that this is a draft of a 5-minute theory, so it's sure to have some holes.)
It sounds like you're trying to say something but don't know how to say it. What do you mean by a "personally successful life"? What makes you think that Communists do less work than Objectivists or Zoroastrians or Christians or Neoconservatives or anybody else with an opinion? Your dichotomy between "personal success" and "a career in changing the world" is downright disturbing. Finally, the implication that Obama (who somehow has too much time on his hands) is flooding the internet with philosophical treatises is so absurd that I am forced to conclude that I am not interpreting you correctly.
feel free to improve my analogy by picking a more liberal talk show shock jockey. I don't listen to any of them Limbaugh or stern anymore. I also avoid opera and 'dr.' Phil. Maybe one of them would be a better choice. I suspect the main premise of the statement remains unchanged regardless of the concrete examples of polarizing emotion driven commentators you choose to represent opposite ends of the spectrum.
However, I would suggest that if your premise is that:
"For every {polarizing emotion driven commentators like Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Malkin, etc. etc. etc} loving, ultraconservative, red-neck out there, thier [sic] is a tree hugging {polarizing emotion driven commentator of which I can't even think of a better example than an entirely inappropriate one of Howard Stern} wannabe..."
...then the lop-sided ability to come up with comparable examples on both sides does tend to undermine that premise.
Personally, I hate the entire idea of polarizing left vs. right as I believe it muddies rather than clarifies political discourse, and I do believe "preaching to the choir" is endemic across the political spectrum, but honestly, you are choosing a pretty bad example to make that case.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
"If it turns out that a random selection of 20 users are typically too lazy to rate the songs that are submitted to them, you could even make artists submit $10 to have their songs rated by the focus group, and pay each of the 20 raters $0.50 each for their trouble."
So, you are proposing... mandatory focus groups before groups get airtime.
Isn't that just exactly what the large media corporations already do to work out which of their acts is likely to become popular, and save marketing money upfront? And which the alt/indie scene constantly rail against as 'dumbing down for the lowest common denominator'?
Not that I'm saying your conclusion is wrong, but it seems you're arguing for a system essentially unchanged from the current one, just with a thin 'Web 2.0' veneer over the top.
"A necessary condition for being among the "best" essays would be to convince the most people of something that they didn't believe before, without resorting to tricks such as blatantly fabricating statistics or attributing made-up quotes. This is not a sufficient condition for merit -- maybe the point of view that you're convincing people of, is still wrong -- but I submit that if you're not at least changing some people's minds, then there's no point."
And this exists too, it's called 'debate club'.
However, you're assuming the only point to blog writing is rhetoric - swaying people's opinions, regardless of the truth of the facts.
Maybe some people also write to convey honest information honestly, and don't care whether people agree or disagree or change their minds afterwards? Maybe some bloggers *aren't* primarily in it to be playas in the ideological power game, but want to document their little piece of the world as they see it?
I know a lot of political bloggers only care about swaying hearts and minds, but frankly those writers scare me. It's like they're hired guns and whatever they decided to make me believe, they'd try to sell me, just to see if they could. I don't trust those kind of people, and I'd trust them a lot less if entry to 'the blogging club' was somehow formally administered based on how effective an opinion-swayer they were.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sorry, a big wall of text there, so I am just going to have to go with what everyone else is saying.
Electronic media creates reality
Electronic media creates your mind
Do androids dream of electronic sheep?
Last night I watched the nightly news
Last night I watched the nightly news
Do you watch the nightly news?
Do you watch it, faithfully?
Night after night after... [baa!] night?
I watch it.
I watch it.
We watch the nightly news.
But last night was different.
Something happened.
As I watched I suddenly saw that
*gasp*
My hands had become little hooves
My feet were little hooves
*gasp*
My nose was long
My nostrils were big
*gasp*
I had two furry ears
I was covered with wool
*gasp*
When I opened my mouth out came, "baa baa."
The anchorman was saying, "blah blah."
And I replied, "baa baa."
The anchorwoman was saying, "blah blah."
And I replied, "baa baa."
Electronic media creates reality
Electronic media creates your mind
Do you watch the nightly news?
Do you watch it, faithfully?
Night after night after... [baa!]?
When they go, "blah blah blah"
Do you go, "baa baa baa"?
And you have the nerve to ask us
Do androids dream of electronic sheep?
And so we reply,
"Yes, we dream of electronic sheep.
"We dream... of you."
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I've told you about this until I'm blue in the face, but you're too stupid to get it. I have to go now to a different web site to calm down. Maybe I will have a look at Wikipedia, but that might be another night of sleep lost because there's someone wrong on the internet.
You say that the best songs (or articles) will still succeed even in the current unfair system, and that the issue is just the middle.
On the internet, there is a saturation of opinion articles. If there are enough of the best out there, why do we, as consumers of information, need a sorting algorithm to promote the middle?
I completely agree that, from the standpoint of a writer or a more democratic marketplace of ideas, it would be better to have some sort of better moderation system than the current one.
And once he has a project started, he has built an empire of grapevines capable of announcing his project to every corner of the earth. He really is amazing in his speciality.
You mean like OpenCola, which felt flat on its face?
Please help metamoderate.
These findings suggest that we behave in a manner very similar to that defined by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization . The layperson's explanation of the ant-pathfinding algorithm is simply, "The more ants that travel down a path, the more ants will travel down that path." If there is an obstacle to food-gathering, and two equivalent ways to get around it (ie a Buridan's ass situation), if a majority of ants prefer one path to another, the majority of ants will follow, creating a positive feedback loop for the one path and a negative feedback loop for the other. Much like our music-selection choices, apparently!
I was reading your comment interestedly, until you tried to claim that people preventing hate speech in a formative environment are equivalent to those trying to censor ideas. Hurting others is not a form of free speech; it's a form of stupidity.
"(and you can keep your smart remarks to yourself)" -From the Article
Ummm... then why post it on /. We lurk here for the express purpose of making smart (and sometimes not so smart remarks. Sheesh, way to take the fun out of it.
Those who can do... Those who can't get a certification from Cisco or Microsoft.
The writer touched on this near the end with the increasingly convoluted measures and counter-measures. We live in a society of people with 16-20 hours per day, and far less than that can be diverted from work, hobbies, etc. There's hundreds of millions of internet connected people and a societal requirement to be able to discuss things with other people to achieve any sort of solid social footing. (that's just fancy speak for "mob mentality") Unless the fundamentals of society change, and I doubt they ever will, the snowball effect will never go away.
Note how we still discuss ancient greek philosophers from over 2000 years ago, who became famous over pondering problems that nearly everyone thinks about at some point in their lives. There's no doubt in my mind that they were merely rewarded by the snowball effect...and had (or acquired) the resources to not be burdened by a real job.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
...until you started trying to create a better system. I like the idea of a meritocracy, but it still runs off the idea of there being a definition for "best" - in the case you described, it would be what a majority of users like, which is not that different from what we have now. My answer to the definition of "best" is just a reminder that "best" is always an opinion, not a fact, nor can "best" be made a fact through opinions. They're just opinions; each person's personal belief about something. Not facts. I mean, I find the occasional thing to like in Hannah Montana or the Jonas Brother's music, and I'm downloading Arch Enemy's discography right now (to save you some time: they are a Swedish death metal band). "Best" is relative.
So I think the system for music we have now works... well, I'm not going to say "best," but as well as we can realistically get. Sure, mainstream music media such as radio and iTunes promote more based on popularity than merit, but there are thousands of alternatives, such as musicovery.com , which is one of my favorite websites. Admittedly, these alternatives are often hard to find. But "best" is an opinion - and no matter how you try, there's pretty much no way in our diverse society to convince everyone that your new model is best.
Besides, I'm not comfortable with the idea of bands being notified when they fail to pass a ratings benchmark and users being able to suggest things. Just as I support there being several options in music industry organization, I support bands doing their own thing. There's somebody in the nearly 7 billion people on our planet who'll like it. And, as you sort of admit, your proposed system just uses popular opinion in a new way. I feel that eventually one sound would rise to the top, as it already has to an extent, and bands would start to conform to that sound, just as they already have somewhat. I think they might do it more frequently, even. With just a paper full of sales numbers, there's no one thing telling you why your band's not at the top of the charts. With thousands of users directly telling you "be more like Miley Cyrus, I like her music better," well, I'd imagine that some bands would find that hard to ignore.
Though you seem to be replying to me, I assume you must have mistakenly intended that particular criticism for someone else, since I never made any assertion that eloquence or articulation was unimportant or unnecessary. They most certainly are. That doesn't mean one has to be a master of prose or poetry, though perhaps that mastery wouldn't hurt one's chances of being noticed and modded-up, either.
It's not about liking a song because others have downloaded it, it's about downloading the song so that you keep up with what everybody else is doing. So you can talk about the song with everybody else. So you're not left behind in the social world.
That's a very logical reason.
The description of the music-rating system is very nearly perfect. What can I say--major kudos!
As for the blog stuff, consider this: people who disagree with stuff tend to self-censor. That is, once they decide they disagree with someone on a regular basis, they are unlikely to read their blog anymore. This is why sites like Slashdot gradually attain something of a unifying "mentality"--because people who don't like it simply don't come back.
People who disagree with the stuff they read are always going to be in the minority of readers because of this self-selection. This is not dissimilar to the people in the music-rating system signing up to the "alt-rock" category--they're not likely to go off polluting the ratings of songs in the "metal" category, because they already know they don't like it and consequently avoid it! Likewise, most users are not going to subscribe to be notified about new Fox News video clips if they already know they won't agree with most of them.
To sum up: I don't think we need to worry about the whole "What about the Bush supporters versus the non-Bush supporters". In most cases this is quite simply a non-issue, because content consumers self-select which "channels" they want to receive.
Thus the music-selection model you propose should work equally well for all kinds of content, without modification, I believe.
Uhh, tl;dr.
Just Kidding.
It's nice to see a "full" article, and thought out well. I've tired of the short nonsense blurbs in Slashdot.
Maybe the best way for me to let you know how much you are projecting your own ideas onto that paragraph you excerpted from the story is by telling you I have no idea, without further information, who or what this "cheap shot" you complain about is supposed to be at.
Is the "cheap shot" at people who write pro/anti-Bush rants? Is it at the people who rank the content according only to their preexisting biases? Is it the popularly held opinions themselves? Is it Mr Bush?
All of them? None of them? I have no idea. There is no clue to be found either in the excerpt or your comment.
You are seeing things which are not there.
Let my new 7-digit UID be a lesson to all - write down your passwords.
Who would that thought that there is a shitload of stuff out there
Things you missed: a) Sturgeon's Law
b) a direct link to one of Seth's articles on a power law or unheard voices
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/000745.html
c) the system you propose looks like Slashdot without an editor - K5?
d) economic theory on network effects which covers a lot of this ground
e) email me if you read this Bennett
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Honestly, reading this article, I thought the writer was using the word censorship to appeal to the Slashdot crowd while venting a grievance for his apparently unheralded genius going unrecognized.
Really, no one's expecting every philosopher and artist to be their own publicist. They're different skills. If you really want to get your ideas out there, hire someone who knows how to work social connections and appeal to psychological heuristics to publicize and market what you've got. They can make crap sell, so if your stuff's as good as you think, so much the better.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
Apparently they used a song from a band I was in back in high school (6 yrs ago). Random finding that on /. in a paper on princeton's server.
To the networks, the news isn't about the news, it's about presenting content that gets a viewer's attention and keeps them there through the commercial break. Therefore stories that don't appeal to the largest possible audience are dropped while sensationalism and gimmicks such as "teasers" become the norm.
I assume you are referring to the morning/evening half hour news programs produced by local TV station affiliates all over the US. Usually they are intended to be locally oriented, in that they are most concerned with reporting on happenings within their particular broadcast area. With few exceptions, items of national or international interest are rebroadcast from other sources such as AP. It's not that these programs are censored, it's just that their focus is not primarily on international events- I've always suspected that this was to keep them from competing with the "nightly news" programs produced by the likes of ABC, NBC, etc.
Now, as for network news shows (think "NBC Nightly News"), I've always been of the opinion that they are too short to report anything more helpful than a brief synopsis of the day's events. This is where I can agree with you that the news definitely feels "censored", where the only stories being run are those which generate the most interest/attract the most viewers... and where even the most important stories are reduced to little more than sound bites and flashy clips that appeal to our collective 15-second attention span.
As for cable news networks, since they have all the airtime they want they should be able to cover more news, right? Nope, wrong. Spend an hour watching the half dozen or so news networks that you get on basic cable, and you begin to notice that they all follow the same format: anchor introduces a news item, we (maybe) get a few video clips and some background information, anchor introduces partisan "expert" guests who take turns arguing about the topic from either a far left or far right viewpoint, anchor cuts them off and gives their own opinion. Commercial break, repeat.
It's a terrible way to report objectively on current events, made even worse by the fact that only the hottest topics are beaten to death ad nauseum while other issues are given virtually no airtime whatsoever.
I'm not sure if it's really limited to the US. After all, when I've traveled in the UK it seemed as if half of the news was of the "entertainment" type: what's happening to some famous star, which actress is getting married, which one is getting a divorce, and so on. In Canada there seems to have been alot of US news lately, to the point that this summer I had more than one Canadian tell me "I'll be glad when your election is over so that we can get on with our own lives." My observation was that by June they were even more sick of hearing about our election than we were.
http://rangevoting.org/VenHist.html describes how the republic of Venice elected its Doge, the highest ranking official. In some of the phases of the process, it is similar to the random assignment of music to one of Salganik's eight artificial "worlds", which had to work with a much larger population. (Note that Venice had a population of 150,000 in 1630, roughly one two-thousandth the current population of the US.)
Nominees were often chosen by committees, who in turn were selected by a hopefully-incorruptible random process (involving selecting balls from urns) then the election for that position was among those who had been nominated. By having multiple stages of both random and election processes the Venetians tried to make the system incorruptible (thanks to the randomness) but also striving for maximum quality (due to the democratic electing-the-best processes).
Thus the process for electing the Doge, as of 1268 (when it was employed for the election of Lorenzo Tiepolo), had reached this amazing almost-final form [Lane p.111; also described by Lines p.156]:
1. Choose 30 of the Great Council members (of whom there were 1000-to-1500, typically; all male) by a random process;
2. Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
3. The 9 name 40 nominees;
4. The 40 are reduced to 12 by a random process;
5. the 12 name 25 nominees;
6. Reduce them to 9 by random processes;
7. The 9 name 45 nominees;
8. Reduce them to 11 by random processes;
9. The 11 named 41 (all of whom had to be ageâ¥40 years);
10. The 41 elected the Doge (from among nominees they chose; any of the 41 could write a name on a slip of paper, and from then onward, that name was a candidate) by range3 voting!
11. This choice theoretically was subject to approval or veto by the mass of the people (assembly) but I am unaware of any instance in which that veto was exercised. This perhaps meant this step was a mere formality with the People not really having any power. But another interpretation is that the threat of a veto kept the Grand Council honest in its choice they refused to risk the embarrassment of a veto.
In this process, only the penultimate step â" the election â" "really mattered" â" the rest was mainly intended to make the identity of the 41 unpredictable hence making the process (hopefully) uncorruptible. The 41, during their deliberations, were sequestered rather like the juries in modern-day big-time criminal cases. This again was presumably intended to insulate them from corruption.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Your concept is flawed simply because you believe that you can beat Mother Nature. The randomness of Nature always beats the best efforts of the greatest minds. So, instead of swimming against the current, why not go with the flow?
You can communicate with like minded friends and the group will naturally grow. As it increases, so will its influence and its ability to crunch data. In the end, your group will be one of the groups to which people turn for authority, and the things you and your friends view as important will filter into society with greater frequency.
The situation you have described really is one where the more effort you put into the fight, the more you are destined to fail. Find the natural way, and it will magically work -- almost without effort.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
just track the session ID of a user and their "support" status... that way, if they click "pro-Bush" the options for the next article they read will only offer them options to "still pro-bush" or "anti-Bush" and visaversa...
It isn't just that you are stereotyping, but that the stereotypes themselves are off-base. I'd wager that Che Guevara and Trotsky put in some serious work doing what they believed in. The "OSS giants" swipe is asinine, since they're just programmers, which is the same activity whether you're being paid or not.
Pop stars also work hard, even though some of us may be indifferent to their accomplishments. What's with your Obama issue? He was a professor of constitutional law, then a state state Senator and then a US Senator. Do you consider McCain's 25+ years of service in the US Senate to not be "real work?" Do you have a thing against teachers, or just professors, or just professors of consitutional law? Or just professors of constitutional law who later run for president?
Even if we flip the political polarity of your post, I'd argue that Rush Limbaugh, Grover Norquist, and Tom Delay do (or have) worked hard at what they do. What they do may not be good for the country, but that isn't the same thing as being lazy. Many people spend their time on advocacy, and I'd be cautious in assuming that they're all doing so just because they're a failure in other areas. Or do you only think that left-leaning advocates are abject failures, while right-wing advocates are all motivated by a love of truth and justice?
Of course not, I just took advantage of your +5 post to gain visibility. I wanted to put that remark at the end of my post in an ironic and nifty way but well... I have the short term memory of a squirrel.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If you had a brilliant, absolutely airtight argument that we should do something...
Do The Math: The Ninety-Foursquare Thesis
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
Aww, why not let them fuck sheep, instead.
Damn I have a sick mind...
I think the idea is great. And the only way to truly test it is to build it. I'll help. I have a vested interest. http://findyourfans.com/
Living in France, a (practically) oligarchic 3-some news network dictates the news : info that needs a bit of fact-checking from the part of journalists (instead of simply repeating the pieces of news) is simply not heard ...
Our president understood exactly how to practically sensor information : drown the medias with a flow of irrelevant (and, most of the time, misleading) info, so that he can basically do what he wants with scarcely any opposition
From that, one can see the golden rule for practical sensoring : appeal to the journalists' laziness and herd behaviour (befriending TV networks' chairmens also helps a lot)
That's what a friend of mine used to call it: The social black hole effect. Get enough people hanging out together regularly, and the group tends to stay together, and even starts to accumulate other people. Once you get enough people in a certain site (such as /.), people tend to stay there because everybody else is there. Meanwhile, other sites that don't quite hit that magic self-sustaining level fade away over time. Granted, the social 'black holes' can fall apart if the core people involved break up and go their separate ways.
(As a note: said friend coined this term after he started up his own meeting location to hang out with his friends, and it resulted in everybody wanting to meet there rather than the 'official' social hangout, which eventually fell into disuse.)
People tend to be pack-oriented. Sociologists have known this for years.
And yes, given that I've posted this a day after the story went up, it's unlikely too many people will see this.