> For those of us who try to spend a large amount of our down-time learning, and those of us who are drained by the injustices of the world, running into the same old fights and arguments when we were instead seeking new knowledge saps us of our will to learn and create. This is deeply unfair to those of us who *already* understand what we must do to help create a more fair and equitable society.
This is not a unique problem to social justice, this is a problem about large groups with information asymmetry more generally. September is still not over: every year millions of people get added to the internet, get old enough to enter academia, and in general -- become members of the global conversation and system of thinking beings on earth. Every year those millions have to pick up the beginning markers of discussions that have been going on for a *long time*. And unfortunately, some of us have to participate in that.
Threaded conversation is miraculously better that flat conversation, which is better than the combination of paper and your local community, in terms of allowing viewpoints to both be present on complex issues, and for large groups to coherently converse, but the problem comes when we get to the point where complex threads have been gone over, as you point out, for the nth time, and we statistically speaking speak past eachother more often than not.
There is a tradeoff between allowing for diverse viewpoints in a global conversation, and filtering those who don't know that what they are trying to say has been said a thousand times before, and the learning that comes along with those very same rehashed arguments in practice. A tradeoff between having the ability to learn, as a group, and the ability to communicate, as a group, on the order of millions at least.
One thing's for sure: subreddits fails after the first million users or two. Splitting back into subcultures that interact haphazardly doesn't work: we end up talking mostly about pictures of cats, and technical forums become a clusterfsck of drama.
I think part of the problem is who owns the commanding heights, right now -- reddit has tools for detecting high level patterns in conversations -- meme detection. Instead of using these tools to resolve these complex, multi-million person arguments, they are currently used for the benefit of advertisers.
There's little glimpses of what the next step could be, but no whole picture. In the bitcoin subreddit, someone wrote a bot for the purposes of identifying sockpuppets, which failed miserably at its task but which actually succeeded at pairing users together who had different opinions on the same topic but who thought most similar to eachother. Think of it as a kind of meiosis of ideas -- after the community found itself in a position where it was too big to make progress on a complex issue, and the issue wasn't going away, what *could* have happened would be a splitting of the issue into a bipartite graph, with the two sides of the graph being the two sides of the issue, and the links being between those who had the best chance of being at the level of understanding/wavelength. This kind of tool has never been used at scale to solve social justice problems.
We won't know whether it could work unless it could be credibly tried.
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This is not a social justice problem, this is an communication/education problem
Date: 2015-08-08 04:56 am (UTC)This is not a unique problem to social justice, this is a problem about large groups with information asymmetry more generally. September is still not over: every year millions of people get added to the internet, get old enough to enter academia, and in general -- become members of the global conversation and system of thinking beings on earth. Every year those millions have to pick up the beginning markers of discussions that have been going on for a *long time*. And unfortunately, some of us have to participate in that.
Threaded conversation is miraculously better that flat conversation, which is better than the combination of paper and your local community, in terms of allowing viewpoints to both be present on complex issues, and for large groups to coherently converse, but the problem comes when we get to the point where complex threads have been gone over, as you point out, for the nth time, and we statistically speaking speak past eachother more often than not.
There is a tradeoff between allowing for diverse viewpoints in a global conversation, and filtering those who don't know that what they are trying to say has been said a thousand times before, and the learning that comes along with those very same rehashed arguments in practice. A tradeoff between having the ability to learn, as a group, and the ability to communicate, as a group, on the order of millions at least.
One thing's for sure: subreddits fails after the first million users or two. Splitting back into subcultures that interact haphazardly doesn't work: we end up talking mostly about pictures of cats, and technical forums become a clusterfsck of drama.
I think part of the problem is who owns the commanding heights, right now -- reddit has tools for detecting high level patterns in conversations -- meme detection. Instead of using these tools to resolve these complex, multi-million person arguments, they are currently used for the benefit of advertisers.
There's little glimpses of what the next step could be, but no whole picture. In the bitcoin subreddit, someone wrote a bot for the purposes of identifying sockpuppets, which failed miserably at its task but which actually succeeded at pairing users together who had different opinions on the same topic but who thought most similar to eachother. Think of it as a kind of meiosis of ideas -- after the community found itself in a position where it was too big to make progress on a complex issue, and the issue wasn't going away, what *could* have happened would be a splitting of the issue into a bipartite graph, with the two sides of the graph being the two sides of the issue, and the links being between those who had the best chance of being at the level of understanding/wavelength. This kind of tool has never been used at scale to solve social justice problems.
We won't know whether it could work unless it could be credibly tried.