Critical thinking education trumps banning and censorship in battle against disinformation, study suggests
theluddite @ theluddite @lemmy.ml Posts 12Comments 348Joined 2 yr. ago

This study is an agent-based simulation:
The researchers used a type of math called “agent-based modeling” to simulate how people’s opinions change over time. They focused on a model where individuals can believe the truth, the fake information, or remain undecided. The researchers created a network of connections between these individuals, similar to how people are connected on social media.
They used the binary agreement model to understand the “tipping point” (the point where a small change can lead to significant effects) and how disinformation can spread.
Personally, I love agent-based models. I think agent modeling is a very, very powerful tool for systems insight, but I don't like this article's interpretation, nor am I convinced the author of this article really groks what agent-based modeling really is. It's a very different kind of "study" than what most people mean when they use that word, and interpreting the insights is its own can of worms.
Just a heads up, for those of you casually scrolling by.
Yes I agree. I meant the fundamental problem with the idea of LLMs doing more and more of our code, even if they get quite good.
The real problem with LLM coding, in my opinion, is something much more fundamental than whether it can code correctly or not. One of the biggest problems coding faces right now is code bloat. In my 15 years writing code, I write so much less code now than when I started, and spend so much more time bolting together existing libraries, dealing with CI/CD bullshit, and all the other hair that software projects has started to grow.
The amount of code is exploding. Nowadays, every website uses ReactJS. Every single tiny website loads god knows how many libraries. Just the other day, I forked and built an open source project that had a simple web front end (a list view, some forms -- basic shit), and after building it, npm informed me that it had over a dozen critical vulnerabilities, and dozens more of high severity. I think the total was something like 70?
All code now has to be written at least once. With ChatGPT, it doesn't even need to be written once! We can generate arbitrary amounts of code all the time whenever we want! We're going to have so much fucking code, and we have absolutely no idea how to deal with that.
Bluesky!
I recommend this too. Some of my friends and I take turns paying for things such that we've long forgotten who was first. It makes it so that you always have an excuse to see a friend ("Hey, I owe you a beer!" or "You owe me a beer!"). It's so easy to get sucked into work and life and such, that it's sometimes the little push I need to see them, or the excuse I need to get them to come over.
Thank you :D I also thought it was a good analogy, especially since we've just accepted it as inevitable. Even with all the urbanism revival enthusiasm on the internet, they never push for beauty, just practical stuff like walkability, public transit, etc. It's good stuff, but I want bread and roses too.
And yes, it's getting there fast, if it's not already there. I remember in 2015, when people still loved google, and I started talking about what I then called "The Apple Crisp Problem." In a span of just a couple years, googling recipes went from super useful to entirely SEO blogs of maybe-not-real women in their late thirties named "Kate" taking their dog named "Pancake" to the orchard to pick the perfect apples for her also-not-real nana's apple crisp recipe. Recipes were one of the leading indicators. Now it's just everything. Super lame.
Oh no who could've possibly seen this coming? Literally everyone, it turns out.
I wrote that so long ago I hardly even recognized it. Glad it still holds up 😅.
And thanks so much for the recommendation! I have never heard of either and look forward to reading both.
I write an anticapitalist tech blog at theluddite.org
It's not warrented, but it's necessary.
Wow, that was a lot to take in.
I'm a DSA member, though I'm not that involved (I go to any labor actions in the area, and the occasional meeting). All these panelists seem righteous as hell, and this is intended only as comradely, constructive criticism: I can't help but wonder if maybe they're a little too inside to really properly diagnose the DSA's falling support (and other problems they talk about).
I think the DSA's fundamental problem is that it misunderstands how to wield the little power it has. Te debate about endorsing candidates and such was healthy and good, but outside that, this feels a bit forest for the trees.
The DSA has gained some visibility. That gives it the power to broadcast a message into the world, but their limited reach means it has to be simple, and, in my opinion, it should focus on material conditions. Right now, if you go to their website, you don't even get a coherent definition of what democratic socialism is. Here's their "What is Democratic Socialism?" page, in its entirety:
Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.
We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.
We want a democracy that creates space for us all to flourish not just survive and answers the fundamental questions of our lives with the input of all. We want to collectively own the key economic drivers that dominate our lives, such as energy production and transportation. We want the multiracial working class united in solidarity instead of divided by fear. We want to win “radical” reforms like single-payer Medicare for All, defunding the police/refunding communities, the Green New Deal, and more as a transition to a freer, more just life.
We want a democracy powered by everyday people. The capitalist class tells us we are powerless, but together we can take back control.
Join DSA to further the cause of democratic socialism in your town and across the nation.
Its focus is on "democracy.," and having "real voice" -- I think that's too abstract. Only at the end do they get to material proposals, and even then, they themselves acknowledge it's not actually that radical.
Pair that with other things in the interview:
Yes, I have been pleased with the international work within DSA from both the International Committee and the BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions]/Palestinian Solidarity working group nationally, as well as from my local chapter steering committee.
The international committee has been the leading body in DSA following our platform commitment to de-escalate the US-led cold war on China by exposing legislation that appears to be pro-worker while increasing militarization near the Chinese border, for example. Additionally, our BDS/Palestine Solidarity working group has been advancing DSA’s tangible commitment to the BDS movement by helping create apartheid-free boycott zones.
On Ukraine, the Marxist Unity Group, the caucus I’m part of, and Reform & Revolution [of which Philip Locker is a member] united to draft a proposal that calls on its members elected to public office:
The DSA is on the very fringes of American politics. As much as I deeply support the causes, having entire committees dedicated to issues on the other side of the world creates a lot of exposure for the DSA with very little tactical gain, for either the DSA or our international comrades. Imho, the DSA should aim for simple, clean, unimpeachable, bread-and-butter leftist internationalism when talking about extremely controversial issues that it has absolutely no chance of materially impacting.
When they fail to do so, and their committee on this or that controversial international issue misstep or spirals into drama, as a bunch of small-time political operators are bound to do, as they have done many times and talk about in that jacobin piece, it eats into their ability to get a message across.
The average American has absolutely no fucking clue what socialism is. "Socialism is when government does stuff" is the working definition, and the DSA's definition actually reinforces that, with its emphasis on medical for all and a green new deal. This is a gigantic hurdle for the DSA. An American socialist party will never make a dent on the world if the average American has no goddamn clue what a beautifully rich and deep political and intellectual tradition we espouse.
I agree with every word. My disgust for the way we've decided to run the world is overshadowed only by my sadness.
Tragically, I suspect headlines like this will soon be the new norm. The political crises spawned by the climate crisis are going to be a bad time.
The US 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study is a joint collaboration between a group of independent external academics from several institutions and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram
🫠
They investigated themselves and found no wrongdoing.
I believe the term is platform capitalism:
At this point they've stripped off the mask along with the rest of their clothes and are laughing bare-assed all the way to the bank.
I think people see it the same way a movie is made by the director, even though a ton of people work on it, and, according to Kaiser, that is a misunderstanding of how it happened based on the information made available by the government.
Well, I should've said "build or design," maybe.
But yes, this should be obvious when you think about it, because it's just how things work. Still, in our culture, we regularly refer to physicists as the people who made the atomic bomb happen. Kaiser writes about this too, and the influence it had on McCarthyists, who regularly panicked that physicists were secretly communists because they associated physicists with building the atomic bomb.
It had other weird influences on culture too. For a couple decades after the Manhattan project, being a physicist was considered mainstream cool. Social magazines ran articles with pieces about how no hip dinner party is complete without a physicist.
The whole thing is a super interesting cultural phenomenon and I highly recommend anything he's ever written.
I know this is just a meme, but I'm going to take the opportunity to talk about something I think is super interesting. Physicists didn't build the bomb (edit: nor were they particularly responsible for its design).
David Kaiser, an MIT professor who is both a physicist and a historian (aka the coolest guy possible) has done extensive research on this, and his work is particularly interesting because he has the expertise in all the relevant fields do dig through the archives.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read him, but he concludes that the physics was widely known outside of secret government operations, and the fundamental challenges to building an atomic bomb are engineering challenges – things like refining uranium or whatever. In other words, knowing that atoms have energy inside them which will be released if it is split was widely known, and it’s a very, very, very long path engineering project from there to a bomb.
This cultural understanding that physicists working for the Manhattan project built the bomb is actually precisely because the engineering effort was so big and so difficult, but the physics was already so widely known internationally, that the government didn’t redact the physics part of the story. In other words, because people only read about physicists’ contributions to the bomb, and the government kept secret everything about the much larger engineering and manufacturing effort, we are left with this impression that a handful of basic scientists were the main, driving force in its creation.