Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[silverspawn]

Elon Musk buying twitter is going to be extremely interesting.

[silverspawn]

I'm cautiously optimistic. I do expect more competence in dealing with bots. Time will tell if I'm being naive.

[Awaclus]

I'm cautiously optimistic that this isn't going to end catastrophically, but I don't really have high hopes that things would particularly improve. Twitter is, considering its size, already remarkably accepting of a lot of the kind of speech that usually has to be worried about getting shut down despite being legal, and a lot of Musk's ideas regarding how to improve it have kind of already been tried out in the earlier days of the Internet and they were either not realistic to begin with or stopped being realistic after smartphones allowed dumbpeople to post online. He clearly doesn't understand content moderation, and I'm not sure why he would have better solutions to bots on a large social networking service than the people who have actually ran said SNS for years (open sourcing the algorithm, for example, is probably not going to help — the fact that spammers have to reverse engineer it nowadays makes it way harder to spam efficiently).

I'm pretty much expecting that Musk will either hire someone who knows their ShiT and will explain him why he's being ridiculous, or he's going to try out his ideas and immediately learn that he has been ridiculous, but either way, we'll end up with an Elon Musk who knows that he has been ridiculous and a Twitter that isn't really much different from the current Twitter.

The best scenario I can see here is that Musk and his haters manage to completely ShiT up the platform to the point where it just more or less dies out, which will create the space for a decentralized platform to thrive. But I don't think that's very likely, unfortunately.

[silverspawn]

Want to bet on this? I bet that your take is basically not correct, with someone who is neutral to judge in a year. Stakes are 20 honor points.

[Awaclus]

Want to bet on this? I bet that your take is basically not correct, with someone who is neutral to judge in a year. Stakes are 20 honor points.

I'm not sure if a year is long enough for anything to happen, really. But if you want to frame your position as something like "on 2023-04-26, a neutral judge will deem Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter to have caused an increase in the quality of the user experience on Twitter or prevented a decline of such", I can bet against that. 1:1 odds?

[silverspawn]

yes, if we can agree on a judge.

Something tells me faust is not neutral when it comes to Elon. How about infangthief?

[faust]

yes, if we can agree on a judge.

Something tells me faust is not neutral when it comes to Elon. How about infangthief?

Regardless, I also don't use Twitter, so no matter my opinion on Musk I would not be qualified as a judge.

[silverspawn]

O LORD, VOUCHSAFE THAT I MAY LOVE THEE, FROM ALL MY SOUL AND MIND, AND IN EVERYTHING DO THY WILL

[Awaclus]

I wouldn't object to infangthief.

Also, does it count if good things come out of Twitter being privately owned, or do you want to claim that it's going to get better because of Musk in particular?

[silverspawn]

Depends, but I think it would generally count. I don't think you'd generally discount good thing someone does because someone else would have done it, too. Maybe different if it's just about how the market reacts or sth

[silverspawn]

https://predictionbook.com/predictions/205284

[silverspawn]

I shall now try to find every paper ever that looks at visual illusions in neural networks, and try to use equanimity so as not to suffer from how annoying I find this kind of work. So far I've found like 6, but there are probably more buried deep below the reach of google. A depth-first search based on citations should hopefully get me far.

[infangthief]

yes, if we can agree on a judge.

Something tells me faust is not neutral when it comes to Elon. How about infangthief?

Regardless, I also don't use Twitter, so no matter my opinion on Musk I would not be qualified as a judge.

Me neither. No Twitter and very little social media experience at all.

[silverspawn]

I feel the need to point out that I only follow about 8 active people on twitter, as supposed to 800 as most people do. I don't like looking like the social media person.

[silverspawn]

well even in the absence of a judge, it may be relatively obvious one way or another

[Awaclus]

I don't like looking like the social media person.

That's your reason?

[silverspawn]

uh yes?

[silverspawn]

like it goes against my aesthetic

[Awaclus]

Mastodon is growing already, which is nice. Hopefully it won't just be a temporary effect.

[Awaclus]

like it goes against my aesthetic

Huh. Well that's probably not a dumber reason than what the average person has for most of the things they do, but you're quite a bit more honest about it than most people are about theirs.

[silverspawn]

Lest you give me too much credit, I meant that's the reason for why I just said it here. The reason why I only follow a few people is primarily that I only know a few people who are consistently interesting. (though it would also bother me if I did follow too many, so who knows, maybe that does play a role.)

[silverspawn]

But glad to see some common ground on the stupidity of normal people's motivations. I was starting to worry that talking to you might make me less cynical.

[Awaclus]

Lest you give me too much credit, I meant that's the reason for why I just said it here. The reason why I only follow a few people is primarily that I only know a few people who are consistently interesting. (though it would also bother me if I did follow too many, so who knows, maybe that does play a role.)

Oh.

I'm not consistently interesting, apparently ;__;

[silverspawn]

I've been confronted with the "buying meat is ok because your contribution won't make any difference" argument about half a dozen times throughout my life.

But it's a non-starter! Purchasing meat is very unlikely to make a difference, but it has the potential to do an enormous difference! Maybe your purchase will push the store's numbers over a threshold, which will lead the company in charge of producing the meat to increase production.

So if X is the random variable measuring impact, then E(X) is the product of p (the probability that this happens) and let's call it z (the impact if it happens). And E(X) = p*z will come out as almost exactly the same impact that you would have if someone were killing animals for you personally. To see this, you need only imagine that a million people became vegetarians tomorrow. This would decrease meat production by about the amount that they consume, therefore the impact of each one is 1/1000000 * {amount that they consume} ≈ {amount that one person consumes}.

It's a few discrete jumps as supposed to a continuous curve, but it all nets out to a normalcy behind a veil of ignorance. Ditto voting (if you live in a swing state). So many people don't get this!

In both cases, you also can't tell whether your contribution made a difference. In the case of elections, the discontinuous jump is not actually one person winning with one more vote, it's whatever makes the election close enough for a recount, which then leads your candidate to win after all. You don't know where the threshold is there, but there must be one. if 10 vote difference means recount and 10 million means no recount, then some number n between 10 and 10 000 000 is the threshold.

[silverspawn]

I bet that this has come up somewhere on f.ds before, too, though I don't remember any instance.