Can technology solve the troll problem?
I don’t have a podcast, nor am I popular on social media, because, let’s face it, I’m a designer and architect, and our types are weird(os) for the most part.
I’m not selling anything. When I was, I was popular (millions of viewers). Even by proxy, my LinkedIn profile garners a few thousand likes despite my lack of ‘selling something.’ I enjoy the discourse as my circle of friends (a mixture of IRL and virtual) are mostly scientists, engineers, and most importantly, people that want and care for humanity (two of my favourite words: Care, Kind)
This is simply an insight into how we connect things, how we see patterns, and how we want for something better. Can we get there?
I start with gratitude… I’m deeply fortunate (truly, respectfully) to live in the most beautiful places in the world. I don’t normally ID where I live, but the photo (of the ocean) attached is what I see on the quick drive to my morning walks, bikes, and hikes, which themselves are MORE beautiful. Why do I mention this? Well, let’s face it, most trolls are unhappy people. The more I’ve learned about who is behind the ‘troll’ comments, the more I see simply unhappy people.
And, that is not the most beautiful photo, that is just ‘a’ photo I happened to stop and take the time to take on a drive home one day. It looked dramatic and poetic, and I forced myself to stop for 60 seconds and pull over to capture it for my old age. It looks like a painting, not because of a filter, but because of the f-stop and ISO settings I had prev set on one of my cam app. But, it really looks like that, even better IRL, the opposite of most social pics.
Often, I want to take a pic, and become instantly infuriated by how long it takes for a phone to get to the mode where it can actually take the bloody picture (queue Louis CK ‘Give it a second — It’s going to space!’ No, really, watch this right this second so everything I write here makes more sense). In my mind, I’m angry with other ‘symbolic’ designers and architects of software who failed to make this all easy. They give up before the design satiates all people.
Do you recall the show ‘Herman’s Head?’ (if you ever wanted to know what the cast of The Simpsons looked like, watch this show). Basically, the format is a constant cut away to a room (his head) full of people that represents the silos of Herman’s Greek-chorus-psyche (lust, anxiety, etc). My mind is filled with real people (symbolically) that I respect. And at this moment a comment a friend of mine (Zeke) repeats often rang in my head.
‘The best camera is the one you have with you’ — Chase Jarvis
It’s a deeper comment than most realise. It speaks to a powerful issue I think about constantly. It is not about the Camera, but about the technology itself, the access to it, always, everywhere.
We have the word ‘technology’ as a noun, but not as yet established or popular as a verb: ‘technologise’; To use, or make, a technological feature. It is a common event (daily, perhaps hourly) that I see a pattern, especially one that annoys me, and I search for how it can be solved, to technologise.
Necessity is not the mother of invention (Plato), nor Laziness (Agatha Christie?), but rather agitation!
Most people don’t get agitated enough.
So now, like a strange Quentin Tarantino movie (‘From Dusk till Dawn’), I’m going to completely change the cadence and framing of this post.
Last week, for Women’s History Month (March) Steve Nouri (a popular AI proponent and scientist), posted a simple fun photo of an all women’s Polish flight crew.
Why is it fun? Because it is novel. Why is it novel? History is being made. More importantly, we are fixing the stupid past because dumb people thought some people could not operate these machines.
But then… [queue ominous music] an arsewipe ‘Business Consultant’ wrote:
‘Is it an all female crew because its what was required to be seen progressive or because these individuals are some of the most competent available?’
I (was forced) to reply… a crime of maths had occurred (Mathman to the rescue — time to learn the brilliance of Lenny Bruce). I wrote…
“Are you asking if it is ‘required to be seen progressive or’ … because you don’t have a good grasp of maths and statistics?
Let’s start with a model — Let’s say we have 7 coins (since there are 7 people in the photo of the stated same-sex), and we flip the coin at random. What is the chance they are all the same face?
That would be 1 in 64 for each side, or 2⁷ — 1 in 128 for just one side. A little under 1%.
We can assume that females:
• make up ~5% of pilots
• make up ~80% of flight attendants(Poland’s numbers may vary from Int. avg)
Said another way, on any given flight we can already assume the flights will be all female attendants most of the time.
So now your issue is really just with having 2 female pilots.
I know you will want to make this about ‘being fair’ since that is the partyline of misogynists. But as I’m demonstrating, and any grade-schooler should be able to follow along at this point — the chance of NOT having an all-female crew is actually zero, no matter what the ratio of men to women is, as long as just 2 are female.So, now… can you congratulate all these hardworking people that passed tests you didn’t?”
Of course, he was going to stand on the hill of beans he will ultimately die on, so no need to follow that thread. And yes I’m being rude. One of my philias is out ruding the rude, it’s the most erudite thing I can offer, to bully the bullies (or buffalo buffalos, as it were). But, he is not worth my time to reply further to him. There are two things to be addressed here:
Let me spell this out
I’m not defending women in this retort, they don’t need my help. Rather, he managed to attack the entire professional infrastructure of aeronautics (they don’t need my help either, rather, I’m just framing the conversation).
Aeronautic — The most amazing science and engineering collective in history. A track record that makes all other transports… including trains (you’re on bloody tracks, how do you manage to hit one another?) and elevators (can it get any easier than you are in a controlled tube?) seem like purposeful death traps. Thus, he literally is left with nothing but being a misogynist arsewipe.
Signal to Noise
And now we come back to being a designer/architect. This exchange we had exists at several levels for me, and clearly, I was infuriated, which in my wiring instantly causes me to ask ‘how do I fix this?’
And not just for one’s self, but for everyone. That is also part of my wiring (sorry Ayn Rand, everything you write is correct if we assume that the reasoning of a 2yo is good enough for the rest of our lives: ‘Mine!’).
I recall a quote:
‘If you think that technology will solve your problems, then you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems.’ — Bruce Schneier (a cryptographer)
While I in fact respect this quote, a great quote, useful to get people thinking about the problem itself, ultimately I don’t agree with it either.
I’ll counter:
Sure, not much changes (read as: social problems) Cuz? ‘people.’
And, this is like that other saying
‘Money doesn’t bring happiness.’
Well, let me tell you… some money, and some technology, is FUCKING awesome!
Things really are better today. There is less poverty, less suffering, and life is much better, but people don’t realise it because ‘people.’ — if you have the urge to retort, then you’re being like this arsewipe. Yeah, we all know there is suffering, war, and crap, and we must continue to eradicate that. But there is a place for that. If you can’t truly enjoy the fact that things really are better right now, then you have to examine yourself. The data is HARD, clear, and even getting better.
So what is the Technology here?
Well, it exists already, for example in sites like SlashDot, Quora, and Stack Overflow, and several others. But not on almost any social media (Like LinkedIn, which tries to be a useful tool, but it is ultimately social media).
But why?
Social media is a vampire. It feeds off our fears and anxiety, our disagreements, and that is the addiction (I’d like an argument please). Those other sites, like Quora, are fed on knowledge, curiosity, and philosophy.
SlashDot has the best of the features though; not just can you vote on a post (well… ‘replies’ to the post more importantly), you can tag it with ‘Insightful’ or ‘troll’ or give weight to those votes, and the moderators. It was the ‘core technology’ in my opinion. Meaning, that the site trades in News, with a social spin. But the features, the technology as it were, of the replies, the indenting, the format, the UI, the tagging, all of it, that is what matters. Stay focused on that.
But this ‘feature’ has not migrated to all social conversation threads, and it needs to. Consider how useful it would be to hold accountable every ne’er-do-well that answers an Amazon question with ‘I’ve never used that feature…’ and then continues to give you worthless opinions, stealing your valuable time. Or worse, replies with ‘I don’t know.’
Then why in the bloody hell did you just reply?!
Along with Trust Networks. It needs to be a widget. Meaning, that it needs to be a default, a built-in facet of all communication systems.
While I appreciate that the arsewipe was the impetus to trigger me to reply and write out something useful about maths and statistics, I also want to give my time to good people, and this person is not. So I’m (I hope we are all) torn between an urge to educate (people like this) but also to preserve the value of our attention on things more productive.
We can improve this.
We can have a free and open market of discourse, but one focused on constructive productive discourse as opposed to allowing trolls (or what I call weeds) to proliferate so easily. It should not be an entire site (like the experimental LessWrong), but rather simply the very fabric of all site communication.
I’m all for anonymous posting mind you. But if such a post should be useful (as rare as that is, in fact, my general rule is not to engage any person that does not demonstrate some level of accountability to the social network itself), then we can all tag it, and denote it as such, warning others, or allowing others to gain the benefit of our collective knowledge.
The most disrespectful (sad) thing we can do is give up or ignore the arsewipe. This might seem an odd sentiment, and it is important I continue to call him what he is, an arsewipe. But it is exactly when we dislike another — we must question our own motives and rationality, our reason.
It is when we very much want the defendant to hang from a noose, this is when we must protect their rights the most. This is the central tenet of my entire being. The more I hate them, the more I (we) must ensure they are treated the very best. This is the only litmus test we have to keep ourselves in check.
One small thing I can do is contemplate the technology, architecture, and implementation to help the arsewipe inspire better discourse and results. It's not enough to just vote on things, we need to know who we are voting with, and against, and why, at every meta-level. Everything must have reason.
My favourite question from one of those personality type sorters:
Which do you value more: justice, or leniency (mercy)?
Technology won’t change humans, but, it can be — and is used — to leverage the best of us.
Comments welcome, of course.
