= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
sixes_and_sevens comments on Open thread, 23-29 June 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (190)
Apologies for political content. It shouldn't hurt too much.
Many of you are probably familiar with Upworthy, which uses a system of A/B testing to find the most link-baity headlines for left-wing/progressive social media content before inflicting them on the world. My typical reaction to such content was "this would seem amazingly insightful if you hadn't thought about the issue for ten minutes already". Last year, shortly before blocking all such posts on my Facebook feed, I remember wondering what the right-wing equivalent would be.
I've recently become aware of Britain First, a British Nationalist political group. They have a Facebook page which is the result of a deliberated, professional social media campaign, luring people in with schmaltzy motivational images and kitten pictures before sprinkling on a bit of "send the darkies back". It's not on the same level of technical sophistication or scale as Upworthy, but neither is its intended audience (c.f. my mum and dad).
This makes me wonder, where is the clever social media presence of all the sane stuff? There's a recognisable cluster of "actually, I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that" to which Less Wrong belongs, but I rarely see it being endorsed in the same way as either of the two above examples. Is it just too difficult to spin a populist narrative for this sort of material? Is there an underlying cooperation problem? Or is it there hasn't been a concerted effort yet?
tl;dr: can we raise the sanity waterline with clever use of social media?
Have you heard the slogan, "The truth is too complicated to fit on a bumper sticker"? I'd wholeheartedly endorse that if it's brevity didn't make me suspicious.
Some truths, like the sunk cost fallacy or the value of sensible communication, might be simple enough to fit in a brief funny video.
There have been some attempts to make "rationalist memes", but they're bland for people who are already aspiring rationalists and not funny enough for those that aren't.
The best thing of the sort that I've seen has been Pretty Rational and that has stopped updating for quite some time now.
Firstly, it is an outrageous slur to think that the right-wing equivalent of Upworthy is the BNP. The right-wing equivalent is, of course, the Daily Mail, which has so mastered the art of click-baitery as to become the most read newspaper in the world (as of 2013 - may no longer be true).
Secondly, the social media cluster to which Less Wrong belongs is, obviously, Salon, Slate, and works of that ilk. Yes, Caliban, it's true.
And no, you cannot raise the sanity waterline with social media. All you will get is (as the joke goes) people enthusiastically retweeting a study that finally proves what they'd always believed about confirmation bias.
This seems obviously untrue. Salon and Slate don't seem to have any intellectual or philosophical content other than "left good, right bad." Salon/slate are also borderline buzzfeed clones at this point. Laughably bad.
Slate is marginally better than that.
Like "perpetual motion machine", the conjunction of "raise sanity waterline" and "use of social media" in the same sentence is immediately activating my red flags for "oxymoron; doomed to failure".
For what it's worth, I'm seeing some people getting trained to use Snopes. On the other hand, it wasn't a social media campaign that did it. It was getting repeatedly pointed at Snopes when they posted low-quality links.
Yes. Populist narratives are aimed at people with the attention span of a goldfish who like to get the feeling of them having been right all along within the first few seconds.
"A bit more complicated than that" is a non-starter.