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Computer Scientists Say Meme Research Doesn't Threaten Free Speech
dcblogs (1096431) writes "In a letter to lawmakers Tuesday (PDF), five of the nation's top computing research organizations defended a research grant to study how information goes viral. The groups were responding to claims that the government-funded effort could help create a 1984-type surveillance state. The controversy arises over a nearly $1 million research grant to researchers at Indiana University to investigate "why some ideas cause viral explosions while others are quickly forgotten," particularly on Twitter. "We do not believe this work represents a threat to free speech or a suppression of any type of speech over the internet," the letter said. "The tools developed in the course of this research are capable of making no political judgments, no prognostications, and no editorial comments, nor do they provide any capability for exerting any control over the Twitter stream they analyze," they wrote. The controversy over Truthy may be just another sign of the ongoing deterioration between the science community and lawmakers over basic research funding as well as the science itself.
It's hard to control a thing without being able to analyze it. It's even better when you can accurately model it. Measures of control come afterwards.
I'm not sure that I like this being studied by the government. Use is right out.
I wonder if the Obama White House still has its political "hear something, say something" site to report dissent?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I think that what they will "find" is nothing more than certain criteria all have to be above a certain "threshold" and then the meme goes viral.
But those criteria will all be comprised of humans. Which they will NOT be able to predict.
Even if one meme goes viral in a certain group there will be no way to force a different meme to go viral with that same group in that same fashion.
Although I am looking forward to the names of the units of measure that they will be applying to their research. :) How many milli-LULZ before it goes viral?
I had a related discussion with some friends recently about what they would/wouldn't work on in their job.
Einstein and others famously regretted developing the atomic bomb.
At the time, it was thought that nuclear chain reactions were impossible because the neutrons emitted by a fissile nucleus were too fast to interact with neighboring atoms. Leó Szilárd discovered that graphite would act as a neutron moderator, slowing them down so that they could interact. Each decaying nucleus releases two(*) neutrons, each neutron causes two other nuclei to decay, and so on. Two becomes four, becomes eight, in an exponential manner.
Here's the thing. At the time, conventional wisdom felt that chain reactions were impossible; and entrenched ideas in science are hard to pry loose. If Szilárd had chosen not to publish, it would have delayed nuclear fission research for decades - possibly indefinitely.
Consider the ramifications of having a few decades of technological development before attempting to build nuclear reactors, of social development before ICBMs and Mutually Assured Destruction, and so on. We've come a long way since then - we're much closer to planetary cooperation. The conflicts of the early 20th century seem almost tribal in retrospect.
Here's the essential question: Should Szilárd have published? Knowing that his research was the keystone for nuclear weapons, should he have just kept quiet about it?
The tools make no political judgments, but unenlightened bureaucrats do. And right now there's a lot of abuse by the people in power, the people we should be able to trust with our welfare. One only has to look at elections to see how psychological research is being used - en mass - on the population for political ideology.
Would it not be better to put this research off a couple of decades so that other, more directly beneficial technologies can come first? An environment of secure communications, anonymous surfing, safe and untraceable whistle-blowing seems to be on the horizon.
We have the hindsight to see the results of Szilárd's choice. Should we choose differently?
(*) Average 2.5 neutrons per nucleus