Comments on: The Future Is Filters

By: Nathan

Nathan — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 00:15:08 +0000

We’ve always had filters. When someone in meatspace says something to you that’s too immature, you don’t take it seriously, sometimes you don’t even hear it because it didn’t pass your filter. I’ve been known to not even notice that someone made a sound because they didn’t say something that was relevant enough to my interest. Surely that’s not a freak occurrence.

I believe that offloading our filters to software will make us less aware of them, not more.

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By: #!

#! — Wed, 13 May 2015 20:42:37 +0000

Why do you say that’s “absurdly optimistic”? It seems likely to me.

That seems reducible to the Turing Test* — “How would you classify the opinions of the writer of this post, and the context and content of it?” “How about this one?”, and it seems possible that we could reduce the Turing Test to this — start it in a politicized context and pick an ideological perspective, and reply with an comment you find on that topic, matching your chosen ideology.
(Eh… that specifically is iffy. There’s probably a better one, though.)

And importantly, unless we have that sort of detection — actual ideology and content, not just keyword-matching — it will always be possible to find a break in the filters, and to flood through them until that specific pattern is added. Which will in effect be exactly like barging into a white establishment and yelling that they’re all complicit. And then that establishment gets better security, and the protesters find another establishment or way in.

(* By “Turing Test”, I mean “how you think it would be” — having a conversation with a computer that is indistinguishable from a conversation with someone at a party. So neither the “how it is tested now”, by having a conversation with a computer that can roughly approximate a poorly educated kid from Ukraine who doesn’t know any English (or Ukrainian?), nor the “how it was initially stated”, by having a conversation with a computer that is harder to tell that it’s a computer, rather than a human, than it is to tell that a human is one gender, rather than another which they are pretending to be.)

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By: Zorgon

Zorgon — Wed, 13 May 2015 09:31:15 +0000

More to the point, though, I wasn’t actually talking about the other threats. I was talking about the Big Kahuna, the endlessly repeated one that got her into the papers and on the TV.

I thought I was fairly clear in what I was talking about. Am I wrong? Was there some uncertainty about which threat in particular I was talking about? Or was this just an attempt at goalpost shifting and/or conflation?

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By: Lesser Bull

Lesser Bull — Tue, 12 May 2015 18:28:40 +0000

I would be surprised if the calls to remove books from children’s libraries weren’t mostly made by rightists. My model of librarians is that any books the left strongly disapproves of probably wouldn’t be on the shelves in the first place.

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By: Lesser Bull

Lesser Bull — Tue, 12 May 2015 18:16:54 +0000

@HBC,
my prior is that Red Tribe has less need to engage in boundary-maintaining mockery precisely because they are better at dividing up the world into “other” groups and/or because the Red Tribe divisions are often at demographic joints. Easier to maintain means less maintenance needed.

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By: Lesser Bull

Lesser Bull — Tue, 12 May 2015 18:11:15 +0000

Probably. I know a fair number of rural Red Tribers, who get all their news from talk radio and like-minded friends on Facebook. they don’t have a very good model of the left.

But its harder to be isolated Red Tribe than isolated Blue Tribe, IMHO.

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By: Lesser Bull

Lesser Bull — Tue, 12 May 2015 18:09:48 +0000

Nobody I know voted for Nixon.

Blue tribe is much more insulated from Red tribe than vice versa, because the Blue tribe is more geographically concentrated and runs the cultural and discursive organs.

That’s not a Blue Tribe weakness. It’s a Blue Tribe strength.

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By: Citizensearth

Citizensearth — Tue, 12 May 2015 11:56:17 +0000

Even though I’m coming from the centre/centre-left (and would find plenty of common ground with the average tech entrepreneur), I totally agree and hope that people across the spectrum will work together to prevent things degenerating into a war of filters.

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By: Harun

Harun — Tue, 12 May 2015 06:37:45 +0000

Maybe this example?

The Left wants illegals to be allowed to vote, get healthcare etc. The politically electable left makes occasional references to this, but its the La Raza activists who do the rabble rousing…

Or they convince a bunch of kids to arrive so that they can show them on TV?

I’m still not buying this…its just creating issues and memes.

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By: Zorgon

Zorgon — Mon, 11 May 2015 23:57:25 +0000

AFAICT they are usually talking about one of two things: baph, or IRC logs.

The former is not GG, but certainly enjoys the near total freedom to engage in trolling granted them by people who like to pretend they are (not to mention the anger from GG at this). The latter is literally impossible to trace to any given instance of abuse and is even less reliably identifiable as GG.

Given the mention of it being on 8chan, I can only assume Sylo is talking about baph.

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