Author of THE WINDUP GIRL, SHIP BREAKER, THE WATER KNIFE, and most recently, THE TANGLED LANDS.

Around and About
Joined January 2009
Of course, my favorite idea is just to shut down all the social media companies. Send Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram and all the rest to the same hell as Parler. Fuck these companies. They make us cruel and sick. End them. But that's just me being petty.
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Another quote from Munger, re: incentives: "You do not want to be in a perverse incentive system that’s causing you to behave more and more foolishly or worse and worse — incentives are too powerful a control over human cognition or human behavior....
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... If you’re in one [of these systems], I don’t have a solution for you. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself, but it’s a significant problem." Ruh-roh.
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Agreed on this, actually. I could see the value of upper limits on followers. Or rationed retweets. Things that create friction and limit scale.
I'd argue the opposite: dampen the viral spread to push it from broadcast back to social.
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We're all caught inside the same mad machine. 😂
Agreed. *promptly hits the like button*
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I think that it's not so much that districts absolutely must be heterogeneous, it's that I think they need to be created with criteria other than reducing political competition.
Replying to @paolobacigalupi
I wonder if this can also be seen the opposite way: gerrymandering reflects desired homophily amongst voters. Inverted: Having equal shares of opposites in a district maximizes the share of people who feel un-represented.
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I'm not saying we can make a perfect society. But we need to look seriously at the incentives that led us to this point. The profit incentives, the political gain incentives, the pandering and attention incentives. These small things add up to create perverse outcomes.
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...social media is broadcasting. I'm broadcasting right now. Trump was certainly broadcasting to his 80 million followers. Broadcasters have responsibilities. As users get more and more followers, they should be more and more liable for what they say...
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...the more followers we have on a platform, the more we should be held to account for our behavior, accuracy, and words. If you have a hundred followers it's different than when you have a million. We need some kind of information guardrails, or we'll go off the rails again.
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