Social Media Debate: When experts have to interact with the public who THINKS it knows better (is society getting dumber?)
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I despise people/media that write/comment on shit they haven't a clue about and no interest in
We Should All Know Less About Each Other
Nov. 1, 2021, 7:27 p.m. ET
Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos
Opinion Columnist
In 2017, after the shock of Brexit and then Donald Trump’s election, Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, set out to study what would happen if you forced people out of their social media echo chambers.
Bail is the director of the Polarization Lab, a team of social scientists, computer scientists and statisticians who study how technology amplifies political divisions. He and his colleagues came up with a simple experiment. As Bail writes in his recent book, “Breaking the Social Media Prism,” they recruited 1,220 Twitter users who identified as either Democrats or Republicans, offering to pay them $11 to follow a particular Twitter account for a month. Though the participants didn’t know it, the Democrats were assigned to follow a bot account that retweeted messages from prominent Republican politicians and thinkers. The Republicans, in turn, followed a bot account that retweeted Democrats.
At the time, a lot of concern about the internet’s role in political polarization centered around what the digital activist Eli Pariser once called filter bubbles, a term for the way an increasingly personalized internet traps people in self-reinforcing information silos. “The echo chamber idea was reaching its kind of apex in terms of its public influence,” Bail told me. “It nicely explained how Trump had won, how Brexit had happened.” Bail’s team wanted to see if getting people to engage with ideas they wouldn’t otherwise encounter might moderate their views.
The opposite happened. “Nobody became more moderate,” said Bail. “Republicans in particular became much more conservative when they followed the Democratic bot, and Democrats became a little bit more liberal.”
Social media platforms have long justified themselves with the idea that connecting people would make the world more open and humane. In offline life, after all, meeting lots of different kinds of people tends to broaden the mind, turning caricatures into complicated individuals. It’s understandable that many once believed the same would be true on the internet.
But it turns out there’s nothing intrinsically good about connection, especially online. On the internet, exposure to people unlike us often makes us hate them, and that hatred increasingly structures our politics. The social corrosion caused by Facebook and other platforms isn’t a side effect of bad management and design decisions. It’s baked into social media itself.
There are many reasons Facebook and the social media companies that came after it are implicated in democratic breakdown, communal violence around the world and cold civil war in America. They are engines for spreading disinformation and algorithmic jet fuel for conspiracy theories. They reward people for expressing anger and contempt with the same sort of dopamine hit you get from playing slot machines.
As the recent Facebook leaks reveal, Mark Zuckerberg has made many immoral and despicable decisions. But even if he were a good and selfless person, Facebook would still probably be socially destructive, just as most other big social media platforms are.
It turns out that in a country as large and diverse as ours, a certain amount of benign neglect of other people’s odd folkways is more conducive to social peace than a constant, in-your-face awareness of clashing sensibilities. Little is gained when people in my corner of Brooklyn gawk at viral images of Christmas cards featuring families armed to the teeth. And people in conservative communities don’t need to hear about it every time San Francisco considers renaming a public school.
Right-wing politics has come to revolve around infuriating imagined liberal observers. It’s as if angry conservatives live with hectoring progressives in their heads all the time. Social media may not have created this mentality, but it badly exacerbates it. After all, there’s no point owning the libs if none are watching.
The value of psychic distance can apply within communities as well as between them. In 2017, Deb Roy, director of the M.I.T. Center for Constructive Communication and former chief media scientist at Twitter, held informal meetings in small towns to talk to people about social media. Several times, people told him they’d given up speaking to neighbors or others in town after seeing them express their opinions online. It was the first time, Roy told me, that he heard directly from people for whom social media “is blocking conversations that otherwise would have been happening just organically.”
Roy believes that the potential for a healthy social media exists — he points to Front Porch Forum, the heavily moderated, highly localized platform for people who live in Vermont. But it’s notable that his best example is something so small, quirky and relatively low-tech. Sure, there are ways of communicating over the internet that don’t promote animosity, but probably not with the platforms that are now dominant. In a country descending into a perpetual state of screeching acrimony, we might be able to tolerate each other more if we heard from each other less.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Nov. 1, 2021, 7:27 p.m. ET
Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos
Opinion Columnist
In 2017, after the shock of Brexit and then Donald Trump’s election, Christopher Bail, a professor of sociology and public policy at Duke University, set out to study what would happen if you forced people out of their social media echo chambers.
Bail is the director of the Polarization Lab, a team of social scientists, computer scientists and statisticians who study how technology amplifies political divisions. He and his colleagues came up with a simple experiment. As Bail writes in his recent book, “Breaking the Social Media Prism,” they recruited 1,220 Twitter users who identified as either Democrats or Republicans, offering to pay them $11 to follow a particular Twitter account for a month. Though the participants didn’t know it, the Democrats were assigned to follow a bot account that retweeted messages from prominent Republican politicians and thinkers. The Republicans, in turn, followed a bot account that retweeted Democrats.
At the time, a lot of concern about the internet’s role in political polarization centered around what the digital activist Eli Pariser once called filter bubbles, a term for the way an increasingly personalized internet traps people in self-reinforcing information silos. “The echo chamber idea was reaching its kind of apex in terms of its public influence,” Bail told me. “It nicely explained how Trump had won, how Brexit had happened.” Bail’s team wanted to see if getting people to engage with ideas they wouldn’t otherwise encounter might moderate their views.
The opposite happened. “Nobody became more moderate,” said Bail. “Republicans in particular became much more conservative when they followed the Democratic bot, and Democrats became a little bit more liberal.”
Social media platforms have long justified themselves with the idea that connecting people would make the world more open and humane. In offline life, after all, meeting lots of different kinds of people tends to broaden the mind, turning caricatures into complicated individuals. It’s understandable that many once believed the same would be true on the internet.
But it turns out there’s nothing intrinsically good about connection, especially online. On the internet, exposure to people unlike us often makes us hate them, and that hatred increasingly structures our politics. The social corrosion caused by Facebook and other platforms isn’t a side effect of bad management and design decisions. It’s baked into social media itself.
There are many reasons Facebook and the social media companies that came after it are implicated in democratic breakdown, communal violence around the world and cold civil war in America. They are engines for spreading disinformation and algorithmic jet fuel for conspiracy theories. They reward people for expressing anger and contempt with the same sort of dopamine hit you get from playing slot machines.
As the recent Facebook leaks reveal, Mark Zuckerberg has made many immoral and despicable decisions. But even if he were a good and selfless person, Facebook would still probably be socially destructive, just as most other big social media platforms are.
It turns out that in a country as large and diverse as ours, a certain amount of benign neglect of other people’s odd folkways is more conducive to social peace than a constant, in-your-face awareness of clashing sensibilities. Little is gained when people in my corner of Brooklyn gawk at viral images of Christmas cards featuring families armed to the teeth. And people in conservative communities don’t need to hear about it every time San Francisco considers renaming a public school.
Right-wing politics has come to revolve around infuriating imagined liberal observers. It’s as if angry conservatives live with hectoring progressives in their heads all the time. Social media may not have created this mentality, but it badly exacerbates it. After all, there’s no point owning the libs if none are watching.
The value of psychic distance can apply within communities as well as between them. In 2017, Deb Roy, director of the M.I.T. Center for Constructive Communication and former chief media scientist at Twitter, held informal meetings in small towns to talk to people about social media. Several times, people told him they’d given up speaking to neighbors or others in town after seeing them express their opinions online. It was the first time, Roy told me, that he heard directly from people for whom social media “is blocking conversations that otherwise would have been happening just organically.”
Roy believes that the potential for a healthy social media exists — he points to Front Porch Forum, the heavily moderated, highly localized platform for people who live in Vermont. But it’s notable that his best example is something so small, quirky and relatively low-tech. Sure, there are ways of communicating over the internet that don’t promote animosity, but probably not with the platforms that are now dominant. In a country descending into a perpetual state of screeching acrimony, we might be able to tolerate each other more if we heard from each other less.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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That’s the blueprint on how to be an educator/teacher.
There are some valid points in there.
Retaining anything needs repetition. Some people retains faster/more than others, but the application of repetition remains.
A Nobel prize-winner explained his simple technique for learning anything quickly and effectively
Cristina Fernández Esteban and Nathan Rennolds,
Business Insider España
Dec 13, 2021, 7:24 AM
The idea is to make things simple enough for anyone to understand. Hill Street Studio/Getty Images
- The Feynman technique can be used to learn absolutely anything.
- It was devised by the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman.
- The idea is that when you can teach something in the simplest way possible, you will master it.
Physicist Richard Feynman believed that simplicity was the key to learning.
Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project when he was only 20 years old.
He went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1965 for his work in quantum electrodynamics, along with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.
Feynman always believed that truth lies in simplicity and that things are easier to learn and retain when they're simpler.
When your knowledge of something is full of complex explanations and terms taken from textbooks, you're less likely to grasp it.
He's famously quoted as having said: "You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
The goal of learning is to understand the world better. But more often than not, the way we learn doesn't help us to achieve this.
You end up just memorizing something exactly as it's written in a book or as the teacher explained it to you, so it doesn't take long for this knowledge to disappear.
And this is where the Feynman technique comes into its own.
The idea is to make things simple enough for anyone to understand. In doing this, you can acquire a deep understanding of the topic you're studying.
The Feynman technique has four steps.
1. Choose a topic and start studying it
Feynman's technique isn't limited to mathematics or physics. You can apply it to anything.
2. Explain the topic to a child
This step allows you to establish if you've learned what you studied or if you just thought you had.
Explain the concept in your own words as if you were trying to teach it to a child.
When you try to break things down into simple ideas with plainer vocabulary, you'll realize whether or not your knowledge of the subject is sufficient.
This makes it easy to identify any gaps in your knowledge.
3. Go back to the study material when you get stuck
Only when you can explain the subject in simple terms will you have understood it.
This means that the knowledge will stick with you and not disappear like when you try and memorize something.
Review your notes and study material for anything that you still don't understand.
Try and explain it to yourself in an easy way. If it's too difficult or you have to use terms from a textbook, then you still haven't got it.
4. Organize and review
Until you can deliver a simple, natural explanation, you can't stop.
Go back to steps two and three as many times as you need.
It probably won't take as long as you think.
Everything is under the umbrella of power.
The more control you have, the more you can dictate to the point you can build a system. Eventually, the system must come crashing down, so the next can be built. Sort of like the matrix.
I retain everything important.
Shockingly but not shockingly this is how I've always done things
To me being able to explain it in the simplest terms means you understand the topic completely.
but sometimes its hard to decide what is TRULY important
you just destroyed my vulcan mind
Of course this depends on the subject you’re trying to explain. There is no way I can explain to an 8 year old what calculus of variations and control theory is. But I have enough information to try and break down the weather, history, racism, and so forth by doing demonstrations or connecting it something they may familiar with.
Should I go back to Mr. Robot talk? What the hell I'll mess with y'all today.
How about this ... as a thought.
It's not hard to decide what is truly important because.
WHAT YOU DO is important. If you're not doing it, it isn't important. If you are then it is,
period.
If you ever noticed for me I don't even try to explain it in the simplest terms, I explain it in the language of whoever I'm talking to.
If it were you I'd do it in story terms, if it were 4th dimensional it'd be in weather terms
If you can communicate it to anyone then you understand it.
Yes you can. You just don't talk to 8 year olds about it
You will know eventually what is important when what you need to know at a particular time decides to come up.
If you don’t know and didn’t retain, you will seek that retention next time. We have to allow experience to be our teacher and be ok with not knowing something.
I’m at the point in my life I will tell someone “I don’t know the answer” if I truly don’t know.
god damn it Bills...
(which I assure you would have become our most popular catchphrase)
god damn Bills
This has been a VERY humbling point I have had to reach in my life especially as a father.
Certain minds need a different type of knowledge and the language necessary to understand something complex and the I may not have the words available to express that information.
If I was to try to explain that, it would be something closely related, but not the subject matter itself.
I know what the look of “I don’t understand shit he is saying” looks like. Lmaoo
Ya feel me?
You just haven't tried to explain it to enough 8 year olds
which is fine
but if you HAD to explain it and it was your job to do it you'd figure out just what to say.
For now it's theory and you don't have to put it in practice.
I say that shit in a heart beat hahaha
I'll look it up or I don't know let's not waste time here bullshitting
I do
but you just have to THAT THING every time
Can't you just bank the half court game winning three with your eyes closed?
Do you HAVE to do the shimmy while running backward too?
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Man, that takes experience and communication with a diverse group of people.
You have to have that universal language and approach. I have the general language, street language, professional language, and so forth. We have to wear many hats as communicators.
You also have to put yourself in different environments to improve these abilities.
I wish I had this level of understanding when I was in my late teens and early 20s.
I remember an Atmospheric Dynamics midterm, I got up, handed my test in, and walked out. I told my instructor straight up I didn’t know any of it, wasn’t to point of me wasting time.
Just being honest is enough.
of course to teach the skill would require learning how to apply other math first
its possible to teach or learn a concept without teaching learning the skill
if you can explain the concept of calculating continuous change and the real world application in general
(similar to explaining Newton's theories on motion and gravity - no math no formulas)
the kid can possibly grasp the concept