Comment by dwedge
4 hours ago
> I used to argue with people on the internet, after about six replies, you realize that you’re speaking to someone incapable of thought
He realises the current woe of things but doesn't realise he's been arguing with bot farms and teams of people hired just for this reason - to sow doom, arguments and engagement.
Around 10 years ago I noticed this happening on trending topics of Twitter - it wasn't that the opponents were stupid because they disagreed, it was that they were simultaneously intelligent and stupid in the way they spoke in a way that I realised I'd never seen in genuine people, making me realise it was probably different people or bots under one account.
If I realised it 10 years ago it was probably happening for at least 15. He wasn't better than these people he was falling into their trap
Haha it’s just a foolish move made by those from the ‘90s. We all internalized a different lesson. The younger generations have learned to brush it off and stop responding. Even if the person is human, when you fail to move toward Aumann Agreement, there is no point in persisting.
Us older ones are still fighting the last war. If only we explain it properly, maybe the bots will understand!
> If only we explain it properly, maybe the bots will understand!
I'm going to be thinking about this perfect summary of my frustration of the last 20 years all day
I justify it to myself by saying that even if I'm arguing with a bot, I want to have a counterargument posted for the benefit of the people who are reading the comments
Arguing on the internet is not about convincing the other side. It's about winning the majority opinion and getting more votes. Almost like politics.
Obvioulsy not true for all the arguments, only a subset of those not worth having.
I googled Aumann Agreement and it’s all about agreeing about whether things are true/false/likely/unlikely.
I don’t understand your point at all in this context. What’s “Aumann Agreement” in the context of a discussion about values?
Haha, it’s figurative and requires squinting. “rational actors with common axioms will reach shared conclusions through repeated exchange of information”.
So if you’re not reaching a shared conclusion then you’re not exchanging information, you don’t have shared axioms, or one of you isn’t rational.
If it didn’t land with you, it was just a poor choice of phrase and while I care to attempt to explain it, I don’t care to attempt to defend it.
Values are not different from other positions that people might hold. I believe values and principles are just lossy compressions of positions about specifics because we cannot express them all. When you poke at the edges you find they are fractal. So “what’s your estimate for random variable X?” And “are open borders good?” Are not really different questions so much as questions about different levels of specificity.
My incomplete self-note about this here https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Principles_Are_Compressed_Im...
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The outcomes those values achieve.
I've now completely stopped engaging with anyone on that platform that I can't reasonably traced back to a real person. If any non-real-name account says anything that remotely feels bad-faith in replies, I block them. Having been on the Internet since the mid 90's when it was the frontier, and everyone helped/trusted everyone else, the policy feels very wrong. But unfortunately Twitter has given no tools or alternatives to deal with the situation.
I have found that the only way to deal with this these days is basically to only use my time to discuss things with people in private, invitation only forums. HN is a rare exception for "I am pretty sure you all are not bots (yet)" and yet anonymous.
Everything else that I care about is in private Signal groups or an equivalent of same with anywhere from 15 to 200 people, and adding any new member means they need to be vouched for by an existing one. And at least 55-75% of the people know each other face to face through industry vertical specific events, trade shows, conferences and similar.
I can't even imagine trying to engage with people on something like x/twitter or other social media. Not knowing whether the 'person' you're replying to is somebody's LLM authoried bot farm.
> And at least 55-75% of the people know each other face to face through industry vertical specific events, trade shows, conferences and similar.
Tbh, my experience with _that_ has been worse than with a random sample of internet background radiation, as people seem to have no idea how to filter correctly and who to vouch for and why.
_Especially_ with people they know via work, conferences, etc. Spaces that do not filter for "genuinely relevant contributer to a conversation" at all, but encourage faking that.
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That feels like the intellectual equivalent of limiting your career opportunities within a small tiny villages vs. a large city. There is so much more in the city.
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> discuss things with people in private, invitation only forums
One of the great things about not having ads on rangerovers.pub is that Google is just not interested in indexing it, because it doesn't make them any money. It shows up here and there in search results, sporadically, especially if you know a username or phrase specific to the site, but other than that if you want to know about it you need to be told about it.
I was never a fan of web forums but they are a nice compromise between really oldschool mailing lists and FAANG content-to-eyeball transformers.
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This is the only way to realistically deal with it but it’s not scalable. A platform is only as useful as its non-bot users. On Twitter even the positive replies are likely bots. Real engagement is limited for most users.
On a site like HN, blocklists are very effective at keeping people off your feed.
Same. (I would love to say, but they still get me way too often)
I can also highly encourage people to keep notes and do some basic OSINT. The effective internet is smaller than one might think, so that proves useful time and time again.
Can you elaborate on the OSINT suggestion? Do you mean on the people you engage with?
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>>anyone on that platform that I can't reasonably traced back to a real person
Not sure why that makes any difference - I've had plenty of arguments on Facebook with people who are perfectly happy to spew racist and/or conspiratorial bullshit while having their full names, their holiday photos and photos of their children and/or grandchildren attached to their identity. The weird thing is that these people are 99/100 times incapable of actually having an argument, they either start insulting you straight away or say some variation of "if you don't like what I'm saying then leave" or actually majority of time "what does a foreigner like you know about this topic".
The real names policy has yielded zero of the promised effects imho.
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>it wasn't that the opponents were stupid because they disagreed, it was that they were simultaneously intelligent and stupid in the way they spoke in a way that I realised I'd never seen in genuine people, making me realise it was probably different people or bots under one account.
I believed they were all bots until I actually interacted with such a person in real life. It's terrifying.
I used to think that the people who could not apply any semblance of logical reasoning online were just bots or trolls, but then I started meeting them in real life.
Sure, they exist, but online they are simulatenously unable to apply any logic and then surprisingly coherent and intelligent in the next reply.
I'd love to know if there's a documentary or something that has been done about this, that I could point non-techie people in my life to.
This is some schizo thinking. People you interact with online almost certainly aren't bots or paid.
Certainly aren't bots is dubious, although if there's actual interactions it's likely they aren't bots.
Paid, lmao I wish. Nobody gets paid to repeat propaganda, generally.