Year: 2025

The Internet is Breaking Humanity

February 14, 2025 5:10 pm

The internet is an amazing feat of engineering. A resilient, reliable, fast, and cheap method to move data around the world. I’m a software developer specializing in web application development so the internet has given me a livelihood which I enjoy and which provides well for my family. And I’m an introvert so the internet has given me myriad ways to accomplish daily tasks without needing to leave the house or interact with people. This is great. But something went wrong along the way.

The internet started as a very human thing. People–actual human people!–engineered systems that could connect computers in real time across vast distances. And they used these machines to communicate with each other. These people were mainly academic types interested in the science and engineering behind these feats. The challenges they faced were awe inspiring. As were the solutions.

And throughout these early days the Constant held: Actual human people used the internet to communicate with other actual human people–much, perhaps most, of the time actual human people they already knew in real life or would soon meet in real life. The internet was an extension of, and augmentation to, the social systems already in existence.

For some time one’s first access to the internet was as a college student. And each September a new cohort of freshmen would be unleashed on the internet and the extant user base would indoctrinate them into the etiquette and culture. And this was an important process as it preserved the expectations of behavior in what was still largely an academic, campus-like environment. These were actual human people and the familiar concepts of human interaction carried on from real life to the virtual world. Namely, if you behaved poorly you would be excluded or removed from the group.

Around 1993-1994 the internet experienced what is called the “Eternal September” when the general public started gaining access and it became impossible to indoctrinate the endless flow of new users into the existing etiquette and culture. Things started changing rapidly at this point leading through the massive Dot Com bubble and crash. But there was still the underlying Constant: these were actual human people and the internet was still an extension of, and augmentation to, the social systems already in existence.

When Facebook came on the scene in 2004–focused exclusively on creating an online addendum to college-student socializing–the Constant still held. You created an account, you affiliated with a school, you could find and connect with other students at your school. Everyone was still a real human person.

Then around 2008 something changed. The Algorithm. Suddenly, when logging into Facebook, you no longer saw only what your friends were up to. You saw what the Algorithm wanted you to see. It started innocuously enough. You liked your friend’s post about a soccer game, here’s a post about another soccer game–but made by someone you’ve never heard of and never met and probably don’t care about. And you also suddenly began to discover you didn’t see something that an actual friend posted. The Algorithm decided not to show it to you.

While this was happening the Constant was weakening. Fewer and fewer posts were from people you actually knew. Slowly, instead of communicating with an extension of your real world social system, you were being shouted at based on the whims of the Algorithm. And the Algorithm served only one god: Engagement. Engagement being how long users stayed around looking at things, clicking on things, and typing comments. But why did companies care about engagement? Advertising.

Obviously, advertising existed before the internet and showed up on the internet pretty early on. Eventually websites were being overrun with ads. Banner ads across the top, sidebar ads along the left and right, interstitial ads, footer ads. Ads everywhere. It was terrible.

The spatial dimensions were saturated with advertising. But the Algorithm unlocked the temporal dimension for even more advertising. The longer you stick around the more ads you can be shown. Now the Algorithm’s purpose becomes clear and the addition of the Algorithm turns advertising into something else entirely.

If you log in to Facebook and read the two posts written by your friends and then log out you maybe saw two ads. But if you log in to Facebook and are blasted with a firehose of carefully-selected tripe which contains the two posts from your friends then the algorithm can learn exactly which psychological tricks work on you to keep you around for as long as possible. Videos of cats falling off chairs? Check! Men or women dressed provocatively? Check! Rage-inducing articles about what “they” are doing now? Check! Examples of early-gothic architecture across Europe? Check! No matter what it is, the Algorithm will find it and exploit it.

The Constant was destroyed. The internet was no longer actual human people communicating with other actual human people. It became dump-truck loads of crap being broadcast at you in order to engage you for as long as possible so that advertising can be shoved in your face. The Algorithm decides what you see and the algorithm doesn’t care who it hurts in the process.

Here, finally, we reach the present day. The Algorithm is making money hand over fist for every company that turns it on. It cares not for reality, legality, or morality. And so a final new addition seals our fate: Manipulators.

Once a company turns on the Algorithm it becomes impossible to resist the siren’s song of tweaking the algorithm. Internal Manipulators can trivially make the Algorithm suppress content critical of the controller’s own actions or the actions of people they support. It’s just as trivial to promote content that benefits themselves or pushes a certain worldview.

External Manipulators usurp the Algorithm for their own ends. The Algorithm demands engagement. And from the outside one need only convince the Algorithm that a seeded piece of content is good for engagement and it will take care of the rest for you.

It turns out that some of the most engaging content is anything that gets people mad. So the Algorithm foments discord and encourages arguing and attacking. But this is not the Constant: actual human people interacting with actual human people. These participants have become blinded by the Algorithm and no longer see each other as “actual human people.” It’s road rage writ large and unending. You eventually get out of your car and cool off, but the internet is always right there in the palm of your hand. People you’ve never met making you mad every time you look. And then it gets worse. Those people you’ve never met making you mad may not even exist.

In order to convince the Algorithm that content is good for engagement the External Manipulator uses fake accounts that will interact with the seeded content, argue with each other, and then argue with any actual human who engages them. The more arguing you do the more engagement the Algorithm measures. Then the Algorithm and anger do the rest. Want to turn a community against a group of immigrants? Make up and post stories about people eating pets and the Algorithm takes it from there.

Since the Algorithm provides a custom view to every user it becomes impossible to tell from the outside if this is happening. One defense is to prefer services which don’t do per-user modification. If you can use the service without creating an account it’s probably not doing per-user modification. If you don’t have to log in then you can check for per-user modifications by comparing what you see on different devices. For services which you must log in to you can compare what you see to what a friend sees.

So here were are. The Algorithm has encouraged us to dehumanize the actual human people that surround us because it makes someone rich. I think the only chance for humanity to correct from this feedback loop of destruction is to disconnect from these systems. We need to see each other as actual human people again. As much as I hate to say it as an introvert, we all need to get away from our phones and keyboards and go outside and meet our neighbors.

Games January 2025

January 31, 2025 2:03 pm

Tried out the fairly new deckbuilding game, Mistborn, set in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn world. At a game meetup we played cooperatively but were defeated. The game mechanics have a lot of similarities with Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, but inflicts a strict turn limit to defeat the boss. I dislike this mechanic because it tends to be quite punishing and in this case highly unbalances the game when scaling up to 4 players. Because there are only X turns available and you get stronger each turn you take each player will now be only X/4 as strong by the time the turn limit runs out. This is a fundamental issue with this game because you realistically cannot do any damage to the boss until you reach a minimum level of strength. So I think cooperative mode probably plays better with 2 or 3 players. You can also play it competitively instead.

Jess and I replayed the first scenario of Peacemakers: Horrors of War. We were victorious in bringing about a peace negotiation. It’s still a very unusual game of having minimal power to achieve your ends. Will eventually need to proceed to the later scenarios and see how they differ.

With friends we played Call to Adventure. This is the “story-arc generator” game. Your character begins with an origin, motivation, and destiny and then you cast lots to let fate decide if you are successful in achieving your goals along the way which shape your character’s story. I won.

At another game meetup we raced our cars around the track in HEAT: Pedal to the Metal. I lost. I continue to really enjoy this game. The mechanics are pretty simple and turns move fast, but I have yet to see anyone “solve” the game with a definitively winning strategy. And it comes with a ton of variations to layer in to keep it fresh. That and it’s a game in which you need to play aggressively to win, but playing aggressively doesn’t mean targeting and attacking other players. I typically adopt defensive / cautious play styles and this game pushes me to change that without feeling like I have to choose someone to pick on–which I don’t like doing.

Books January 2025

January 30, 2025 1:51 pm

Le Réveil des Dragons by Morgan Rice

An English fantasy book translated to French. A “chosen one” story about a girl who yearns to be a warrior and is destined for something greater.

An act of defiance against occupiers to save a dragon’s life condemns her kingdom to destruction. With nothing further to lose the kingdom fights for their survival.

When their destruction seems assured, the dragon returns and lays waste to their oppressors.

Carbide Tipped Pens a hard sci-fi anthology edited by Ben Bova and Eric Choi

A collection of 17 stories which I enjoyed–some more than others. None seem to have stuck out to me as being exceptional however.

In Ignorance all Things are Possible

January 22, 2025 4:04 pm

Remy Porter published this post yesterday with his main point being “everything looks like a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.” I think we can easily generalize this to “everything seems possible when you don’t know how anything works.”

The fundamental value of education is learning to pare down from “anything is possible” to “we can bound what’s possible and what’s probable and be skeptical of claims outside those bounds.” Remy’s post is to push back against inane conspiracy theories about TikTok moving data centers during their publicity-stunt shut down (a conspiracy theory that makes no sense on any level, but, as Remy points out, explicitly doesn’t make any sense on a technical level). But it’s the same ignorance-based thought processes of conspiracy theories that drive a million different cons, scams, and lies.

Of course, a fundamental issue is that we can’t all be experts in everything. Which is why a proper education is not simply learning a bunch of facts. A proper education is developing from those facts functioning models of the world, the things and people in it, and the structures of those things and people at both large and small scales. With an appropriate foundation you can develop the “bounds of possibility and probability” and a skepticism for things outside those bounds.

Last night I went to a board game meetup and we played a few rounds of a game called “Sounds Fishy.” The premise of the game is that one person reads a prepared question from a card and then everyone else makes up a false answer while one person has the real answer. Then each person presents their answer to the questioner who guesses who is lying and who is not. On my turn as the questioner the question was “Before mercury was discovered, scientists used what in thermometers?”

I didn’t know the answer, but I have enough foundational information about physics to put a pretty good bounding box around the possibilities. This substance, whatever it was, would need to be liquid in the temperature ranges humans interact with most. It would need high purity in order to be consistent enough to be useful for comparisons between thermometers. And it probably wasn’t something caustic or particularly dangerous to work with.

This bounding box made it easy to rule out most of the lies: sand, whale blubber, fat, cow’s blood, chromium. Leaving me with two candidates: water or brandy. While “brandy” specifically seemed less likely than generic “alcohol” either option fit reasonably in my bounding box. I guessed water as the truth. The game said the answer was brandy. And Wikipedia says that before the sealed liquid-in-glass thermometer using brandy earlier, open-air devices did, in fact, use water. So both answers were correct.

Reasoning from first principles works particularly well in the realm of physics (well, in the realm of “everyday” physics–once you get into quantum effects or relativity it gets harder) because the end point of your reasoning is rather close to the first principles. Regardless, the point is that if you gain foundational knowledge about the world you don’t need to be an expert in everything in order to be skeptical of claims that exceed broad boundary conditions–whether those claims are malicious, benign, or well-intentioned.

Everyone already operates on such foundational models developed from life experience (most people will be skeptical if you tell them you have invented flubber which gains energy on every bounce because it defies their everyday experiences) but education can dramatically help refine them. Regardless of whether our models are refined or not we will inevitably be confronted by claims that fit inside our bounding boxes that still need to be evaluated. We need more tools.

Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West teach a course at the University of Washington titled “Calling Bullshit” (or they did at the time they published the book of the same title in 2020). The topics they cover arm you for situations in which you have no existing foundational models and for the many cases where psychological tricks are being used to intentionally mislead you. If you’re interested in a much more thorough discussion on the topic, I recommend the book.

The highlights should be rather obvious yet huge swaths of the population ignore these basic rules so they’re worth repeating. I take these from chapter 10 of the book. Who’s saying it and what motivation might they have beyond telling the truth–the whole truth? Is a comparison truly apples-to-apples? Does the claim seem too good–or bad–to be true? Is the order of magnitude reasonable (e.g., “nine billion tons of plastic waste was dumped in the ocean this year!”–more than a ton per person?)? Does the claim confirm or exaggerate your existing beliefs (i.e., confirmation bias)? Are there other reasonable explanations for the claim?

Use these tools to protect yourself from disinformation, misinformation, and scams.

Then take it one step further and help protect others too: don’t knee-jerk “like”, “retweet”, “share”, or “react” to the crap flowing across your screen all day. If you’re not sure about it, don’t make the problem worse. Maybe millions of people wouldn’t now believe the blatant lie that immigrants were eating pets in Ohio if more people had applied these simple tools and followed this simple rule.