I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a “firewall” layer between news and ourselves?
I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said “when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest”. I feel it could become the norm.
EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.
EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as “incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!”. The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.
Without wanting to be too aggressive, with only that quote to go on it sounds like that person wants to live in a safe zone where they’re never challenged, angered, made afraid, or have to reconsider their world view. That’s the very definition of an echo chamber. I don’t think you’re meant to live life experiencing only “approved” moments, even if you’re the one in charge of approving them. Frankly I don’t know how that would be possible without an insane amount of external control. You’d have to have someone/something else as a “wall” of sorts controlling your every experience or else how would things get reliably filtered?
I’d much prefer to teach people how to be resilient so they don’t have to be afraid of being exposed to the “wrong” ideas. I’d recommend things like learning what emotions mean and how to deal with them, coping/processing bad moments, introspection, how to get help, and how to check new ideas against your own ethics. E.g. if you read something and it makes you angry, what idea/experience is the anger telling you to protect yourself from and how does it match your morality? How do you express that anger in a reasonable and productive way? If it’s serious who do you call? And so on.
I see where you’re coming from, but if you look up Karpathy, you’ll probably come to a different conclusion.
He’s talking about wanting some system to filter out Tweets that “elicit emotion” or “nudge views”, comparing them to malware. I looked him up and see he’s a computer scientist, which explains the comparison to malware. I assume when he’s designing AI he tries to filter what inputs the model gets so as to achieve the desired results. AI acts on algorithms and prompts regardless of value/ethics and bad input = bad output, but I think human minds have much more capability to cope and assess value than modern AI. As such I still don’t like the idea of sanitizing intake because I believe in resilience and processing unpleasantness as opposed to stringent filters. What am I missing?
I don’t think you’re missing anything. Just maybe you’re taking his tweet more serious or literal than he intended. To me, it’s just an interesting perspective to consider tweets that are meant to influence your opinion as malware. Sure, somebody aware of the types of “bad input” in the form of misinformation campaigns, propaganda or advertisement might not be (as) susceptible to that - but considering the average Twitter user, comparing this type of content to malware seems appropriate to me.
I think you are getting it wrong. I added a small edit for context. It is more about emotional distraction. I kinda feel like him: I want to remain informed, but please let me prepare a bit before telling me about civilians cut in pieces in a conflict between a funny cat video and a machine learning news.
For the same reason we filter out porn or gore images from our feeds, highly emotional news should be filterable
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking a break from social media or news. There are days I don’t visit sites like Lemmy or when I do I only click non-news links because I’m not in the mood or already having a bad day. That’s different than filtering (as per Karpathy’s example) Tweets so that when you do engage it’s consistently a very curated, inoffensive, “safe” experience. Again, I only have the one post to go off of, but he specifically talks about wishing to avoid Tweets that “elicit emotions” or “nudge views” and compares those provocative messages to malware. As far as your point regarding blatantly sensationalist news, when I recognize it’s that kind of story I just stop reading/watching and that’s that.
I WANT to have my emotions elicited because I seek to be educated and don’t want to be complacent about things that should make me react. “Don’t know, don’t care” is how people go unrepresented or abused - e.g. almost no one reads about what Boko Haram is doing in Nigeria (thus it’s already “filtered out” by media), and so very little has been done in the 22 years they’ve been affecting millions of lives. I WANT to have my “views nudged” because I’m regularly checking my worldview to make sure it stays centered around my core ethics, and being challenged has prompted me to change bad stances before. Being exposed to objectionable content before and reassessing is also how I’ve learned to spot BS attempts to manipulate. It doesn’t matter how many times MAGA Tweets tell me that God is upset at drag queens and only Donald Trump can save the world because now I recognize ragebait when I see it. Having dealt with it before, no amount of exposure is going to make me believe their trash and knowing what is being said is useful for exposing and opposing harmful governmental policies/bad candidates (sometimes even helping deprogram others).
I’m putting this in it’s own response because it’s a less important addendum to my main points above and I don’t want to put everyone off with a single huge brick of text.
If just knowing bad news exists makes life difficult for someone, even if they don’t click the link, then I’d (respectfully, not as an insult) recommend learning coping techniques like meditation, diaphragmatic breathing, or cognitive behavior therapy that can add resilience. I am NOT suggesting someone feeling like that is innately weak or flawed, but there are techniques to move the impact of knowing there’s bad things happening towards manageable. If it’s still immediately extremely distressing, there may be related past trauma that needs sorting out.
Physical analogy for social media breaks - I work out regularly. Even though it’s a healthy habit, I don’t work out every day because it’s tiring and that would make it unhealthy. When I do work out though I want it to be difficult because that’s how gains are made. So I’m not saying you or I need to batter ourselves with torturous news every day - breaks aren’t just ok they’re how you stay healthy. When I read the news though, I want the whole truth even if that truth has parts that are uncomfortable or challenge my worldview, and I also want to be experienced/trained enough to handle those emotions and thoughts.