All Communication Lessons

All Communication Lessons

Communication Models List

Communication Models can be divided into three broad groups

  • Linear Communication Models
    • Starting with Aristotle and going all the way through Shannon-Weaver.
    • One-Way – Source to Receiver.
    • Shannon added “Noise” to the Model.
  • Interactive Communication Models
    • Two-Way, but only 1 iteration.
    • Added “Feedback to the Model.
  • Transactional Communication Models
    • Two-Way but adds more than 1 iteration to the model.
    • Adds “Fractal Thinking” to the Model.

Linear Communication Models

Aristotle – 300 BCE

The first communication model (that I can find) is by Aristotle.

There are a couple of different ways to look at Aristotle’s Communication Model.

Aristotle Model of Communication
Aristotle’s Model of Communication

Aristotle proposed his communication model around 300 BCE.

His model is more focused on public speaking than interpersonal communication. This makes perfect sense given the time he was writing.  To Aristotle, the receiver was just a “passive” vessel to be filled by the eloquence and persuasiveness of the speaker.

Democracy was a new thing and being able to persuade others to your point of view was crucial for success in those early Greek City States.

Aristotle’s Model of Communication is formed with 5 basic elements:

  • Speaker
  • Speech
  • Occasion
  • Audience
  • Effect.

Aristotle advises speakers to build different speeches for different audiences at different times (occasions) and for different effects.

In essence, every speech would be unique, since every audience and every time is different.

Aristotle’s Model of Communication

Example: 

Alexander gave a speech to his soldiers before the battle at the City of Issus to defeat the Persian Empire.

Speaker           –    Alexander
Speech            –    about his invasion
Occasion        –    Battle for Issus
Audience        –    Soldiers
Effect              –    To defeat Persia

Or a more current example might be the President’s “State of the Union” Speech.

Speaker           –   The President of the US
Speech            –    About the way the President sees The United States
Occasion        –    A required address to the Joint Congress
Audience        –    The United States People
Effect              –    To enact the President’s Policies.

Shannon & Weaver – 1948

Systematic empirical research on communication began in the 20th Century, inspired by the technical improvements to wireless and wired networks during the World Wars.

One man stood out in the development of the next Model of Communication – Claud Shannon.

Claude Shannon took Aristotle’s model and added an important element – Noise. 

(Noise means obstacles in the communication process. Noise refers to any interference in the channel or distortion of the message.)

Shannon Transmission Model of Communication
Shannon Transmission Model of Communication

A couple of things to notice in Shannon’s Model of Communication:

  • Notice that Shannon only includes “Noise” in the “Channel.”
    • This makes sense because Shannon worked for AT&T. He was mostly concerned with Noise in the AT&T Network.
    • However, it didn’t take long to realize that Noise exists in every element of the Communication Model.
  • Shannon added Concepts like Entropy and Redundancy.
    • By Including Entropy, Shannon offered a way to measure information as the “Reduction of Uncertainty.”
    • By Including Redundancy Shannon offered a way to reduce noise by increasing redundancy.

Linear Models are fairly simple models in which a message is simply passed from sender to receiver.

While the linear model was highly influential during the mid-20th century, this model is too simple for today’s use.

Its limitations are easy to see if you pause to think about the beliefs about communication, or assumptions, made in this model.

A Linear Model assumes that communication only goes in one direction.

Here, a person can be a sender or receiver, but not both.

This is problematic because communication in action is more dynamic than the linear model suggests.

In real life, communication involves a give-and-take between senders and receivers.

Listeners are not simply passive receptacles for a sender’s message.

It is said that one cannot “Never” communicate. Even not saying anything is communication.

A Linear Model is limited because it provides only one channel for only one message at one time.

The reality is that we receive many messages on many channels simultaneously.

A Linear Model implies that messages themselves are clear-cut with a distinct beginning and a distinct end.

The reality is, at least with human communication, messages most often build on one another.

Communication is rarely, if ever, as neat and tidy as a linear model would suggest.

Hence the need for a better model.

So, it is not surprising the next evolution in Communication Models was the “Interactive Communication Model.”

Interactive Communication Models

Model of Communication


In the move to a more dynamic view of communication, Interactive Communication Models add another channel, in which communication and feedback flow back to the communication “Initiator”.

In addition to the 2nd communication channel added, the Interactive Communication Models add Feedback.

  • Feedback is the new term added to the Interactive Communication Model.
  • Feedback is the response the receiver gives to a sender.
  • Feedback can be verbal (i.e. “yes”) or nonverbal (i.e. a nod or smile).
  • Most importantly, feedback indicates comprehension. It helps senders know if their message was received and understood.

In networking, there are specific terms “ACK” (positive Acknowledgment), “NAK or “NACK” (negative acknowledgment). This is a signal passed between communicating entities (or devices) to signify either acknowledgment or receipt of the message, rejection of a previously received message, or indicating some kind of error.

Acknowledgments and negative acknowledgments inform a sender of the receiver’s state so that the sender can adjust its own state accordingly, if desired.

By focusing on flow and feedback, interactional models view communication as an ongoing process.

One notable feature of these models is the move away from terms like “senders” and “receivers” and toward using terms like communicators, actors, or “initiators.

This implies that communication is achieved as people both send and receive messages.

Transactional Communication Models

Fundamentally, this model views communication as a transaction.

In other words, communication is a cooperative activity in which communicators co-create the process, outcome, and effectiveness of the interaction.

Transactional Communication Model 8-11-22
Transactional Communication Model 8-11-22

In the Linear model in which meaning is sent from one person to another, there is only 1 iteration. Once the receiver decodes the message the communication is completed.

In the Interactional model, there are 2 iterations, Sender to Receiver, and then Feedback from the Receiver to the Sender.

In the Transactional Communication Model, people create shared meaning in a more dynamic process. And there can be any number of iterations.

This model also places more emphasis on the field of experience.

Transactional Model of Communication
Transactional Model of Communication

The Transactional Communication Model sees Communication as an “ongoing” process with no specific Start or Stop.

While each communicator has a unique field of experience, they must also inhabit a shared field of experience.

In other words, communicators must share at least some degree of overlap in culture, language, or environment if people are to communicate at all.

This model also recognizes that messages will influence the responses, or subsequent messages, produced in the communication interaction.

This means that messages do not stand alone, but instead are interrelated.

The principle of interrelation states that messages are connected to and build upon one another.

The transactional model forms the basis for much communication theory because:

– People are viewed as dynamic communicators rather than simple senders or receivers
– There must be some overlap in fields of experience in order to build shared meaning
– Messages are interdependent.

Fractal Communication Model

Transactional Communication with Fractal Thinking
Transactional Communication with Fractal Thinking

In the 1960s Benoit Mandelbrot developed a cohesive “fractal theory.”

Fractals provide a predictive model of iterative stability.

Here is the Mandelbrot Set formula:

f(c) = Z2+ c

By using “Feedback” as the “f(c)” function, the efficiency of communication as the “Z2” variable, and the initial starting point of the communication as the “c” variable, Communication fits nicely into Fractal thinking.

Here is the result.

Fractal Communication Formula

f(e) = eC((t+i)-n) + Starting Point

f = Feedback, Fractal, Function
e = Efficiency as measured by the distance to the Endpoint (or Goal)
C = Communication = ((T+S)-N) – ((Technical Value of the Communication + Information Value of the Communication) – Noise)

In words this would be:

“Fractals” describe the chances of reaching our goals

Reaching our Goals are dependent on our Communication Efficiency. 

Our Communication Efficiency is based on our ability to maximize the technical and informational aspects of communication and minimize the noise in our communication.

In a perfect world, every communication act – “iteration” – would move us closer to the end goal.

After every iteration, the question would be: Have we moved closer or further from the goal?

The efficiency of the power of Communication could be “positive or “negative.” In a positive efficiency, the iteration takes us closer to the goal. In a negative efficiency, the iteration takes us further from the goal.

Communication is based on the interaction between, technical communication -bandwidth -, Informational communication – shared code -, and Noise.

This fractal formula for Communication uses the formulas developed by Claude Shannon in his work on the “The Mathematical Theory of Communication. “

First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge

First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility.

Sometimes called “reasoning from first principles,” the idea is to break down complicated problems into basic elements and then reassemble them from the ground up. It’s one of the best ways to learn to think for yourself, unlock your creative potential, and move from linear to non-linear results.

This approach was used by the philosopher Aristotle and is used now by Elon Musk and Charlie Munger. It allows them to cut through the fog of shoddy reasoning and inadequate analogies to see opportunities that others miss.

The Basics

A first principle is a foundational proposition or assumption that stands alone. We cannot reduce a first principle any further.

Aristotle, writing[1] on first principles, said:

In every systematic inquiry (methodos) where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring knowledge of these; for we think we know something just in case we acquire knowledge of the primary causes, the primary first principles, all the way to the elements.

Later he connected the idea to knowledge, defining first principles as “the first basis from which a thing is known.”[2]

Reasoning by first principles reduces the impurity of assumptions and conventions.

What remains are the essentials. It’s one of the best mental models you can use to improve your thinking because the essentials allow you to see where reasoning by analogy might lead you astray.

If we never learn to take something apart, test the assumptions, and reconstruct it, we end up trapped in what other people tell us — trapped in the way things have always been done. When the environment changes, we just continue as if things were the same.

First-principles reasoning attemps to cut through dogma and remove the blinders. We can see the world as it is and see what is possible.

Techniques for Establishing First Principles

There are many ways to establish first principles. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

Socratic Questioning

Socratic questioning can be used to establish first principles through stringent analysis. This a disciplined questioning process, used to establish truths, reveal underlying assumptions, and separate knowledge from ignorance. The key distinction between Socratic questioning and normal discussions is that the former seeks to draw out first principles in a systematic manner. Socratic questioning generally follows this process:

  1. Clarifying your thinking and explaining the origins of your ideas (Why do I think this? What exactly do I think?)
  2. Challenging assumptions (How do I know this is true? What if I thought the opposite?)
  3. Looking for evidence (How can I back this up? What are the sources?)
  4. Considering alternative perspectives (What might others think? How do I know I am correct?)
  5. Examining consequences and implications (What if I am wrong? What are the consequences if I am?)
  6. Questioning the original questions (Why did I think that? Was I correct? What conclusions can I draw from the reasoning process?)

This process stops you from relying on your gut and limits strong emotional responses. This process helps you build something that lasts.

“The Five Whys”

Children instinctively think in first principles. Just like us, they want to understand what’s happening in the world. To do so, they intuitively break through the fog with a game some parents have come to hate.

“Why?”

“Why?”

“Why?”

Here’s an example that has played out numerous times at my house:

“It’s time to brush our teeth and get ready for bed.”

“Why?”

“Because we need to take care of our bodies, and that means we need sleep.”

“Why do we need sleep?”

“Because we’d die if we never slept.”

“Why would that make us die?”

“I don’t know; let’s go look it up.”

Kids are just trying to understand why adults are saying something or why they want them to do something.

The first time your kid plays this game, it’s cute, but for most teachers and parents, it eventually becomes annoying. Then the answer becomes what my mom used to tell me: “Because I said so!” (Love you, Mom.)

Of course, I’m not always that patient with the kids. For example, I get testy when we’re late for school, or we’ve been travelling for 12 hours, or I’m trying to fit too much into the time we have. Still, I try never to say “Because I said so.”

People hate the “because I said so” response for two reasons, both of which play out in the corporate world as well. The first reason we hate the game is that we feel like it slows us down. We know what we want to accomplish, and that response creates unnecessary drag. The second reason we hate this game is that after one or two questions, we are often lost. We actually don’t know why. Confronted with our own ignorance, we resort to self-defense.

I remember being in meetings and asking people why we were doing something this way or why they thought something was true. At first, there was a mild tolerance for this approach. After three “whys,” though, you often find yourself on the other end of some version of “we can take this offline.”

Can you imagine how that would play out with Elon Musk? Richard Feynman? Charlie Munger? Musk would build a billion-dollar business to prove you wrong, Feynman would think you’re an idiot, and Munger would profit based on your inability to think through a problem.

“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.” — Carl Sagan

Examples of First Principles in Action

So we can better understand how first-principles reasoning works, let’s look at four examples.

Elon Musk and SpaceX

Perhaps no one embodies first-principles thinking more than Elon Musk. He is one of the most audacious entrepreneurs the world has ever seen. My kids (grades 3 and 2) refer to him as a real-life Tony Stark, thereby conveniently providing a good time for me to remind them that by fourth grade, Musk was reading the Encyclopedia Britannica and not Pokemon.

What’s most interesting about Musk is not what he thinks but how he thinks:

I think people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of something on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’s ever done that, so it must not be good. But that’s just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up—“from the first principles” is the phrase that’s used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn’t work, and it may or may not be different from what people have done in the past.[4]

His approach to understanding reality is to start with what is true — not with his intuition. The problem is that we don’t know as much as we think we do, so our intuition isn’t very good. We trick ourselves into thinking we know what’s possible and what’s not. The way Musk thinks is much different.

Musk starts out with something he wants to achieve, like building a rocket. Then he starts with the first principles of the problem. Running through how Musk would think, Larry Page said in an

interview, “What are the physics of it? How much time will it take? How much will it cost? How much cheaper can I make it? There’s this level of engineering and physics that you need to make judgments about what’s possible and interesting. Elon is unusual in that he knows that, and he also knows business and organization and leadership and governmental issues.”[5]

Rockets are absurdly expensive, which is a problem because Musk wants to send people to Mars. And to send people to Mars, you need cheaper rockets. So he asked himself, “What is a rocket made of? Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And … what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around two percent of the typical price.”[6]

Why, then, is it so expensive to get a rocket into space? Musk, a notorious self-learner with degrees in both economics and physics, literally taught himself rocket science. He figured that the only reason getting a rocket into space is so expensive is that people are stuck in a mindset that doesn’t hold up to first principles. With that, Musk decided to create SpaceX and see if he could build rockets himself from the ground up.

In an interview with Kevin Rose, Musk summarized his approach:

I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. So the normal way we conduct our lives is, we reason by analogy. We are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing… with slight iterations on a theme. And it’s … mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles. First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world, and what that really means is, you … boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “okay, what are we sure is true?” … and then reason up from there. That takes a lot more mental energy.[7]

Musk then gave an example of how Space X uses first principles to innovate at low prices:

Somebody could say — and in fact people do — that battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be because that’s the way they have been in the past. … Well, no, that’s pretty dumb… Because if you applied that reasoning to anything new, then you wouldn’t be able to ever get to that new thing…. you can’t say, … “oh, nobody wants a car because horses are great, and we’re used to them and they can eat grass and there’s lots of grass all over the place and … there’s no gasoline that people can buy….”

He then gives a fascinating example about battery packs:

… they would say, “historically, it costs $600 per kilowatt-hour. And so it’s not going to be much better than that in the future. … So the first principles would be, … what are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the spot market value of the material constituents? … It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, and some polymers for separation, and a steel can. So break that down on a material basis; if we bought that on a London Metal Exchange, what would each of these things cost? Oh, jeez, it’s … $80 per kilowatt-hour. So, clearly, you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell, and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.

BuzzFeed

After studying the psychology of virality, Jonah Peretti founded BuzzFeed in 2006. The site quickly grew to be one of the most popular on the internet, with hundreds of employees and substantial revenue.

Peretti figured out early on the first principle of a successful website: wide distribution. Rather than publishing articles people should read, BuzzFeed focuses on publishing those that people want to read. This means aiming to garner maximum social shares to put distribution in the hands of readers.

Peretti recognized the first principles of online popularity and used them to take a new approach to journalism. He also ignored SEO, saying, “Instead of making content robots like, it was more satisfying to make content humans want to share.”[8] Unfortunately for us, we share a lot of cat videos.

A common aphorism in the field of viral marketing is, “content might be king, but distribution is queen, and she wears the pants” (or “and she has the dragons”; pick your metaphor). BuzzFeed’s distribution-based approach is based on obsessive measurement, using A/B testing and analytics.

Jon Steinberg, president of BuzzFeed, explains the first principles of virality:

Keep it short. Ensure [that] the story has a human aspect. Give people the chance to engage. And let them react. People mustn’t feel awkward sharing it. It must feel authentic. Images and lists work. The headline must be persuasive and direct.

Derek Sivers and CD Baby

When Sivers founded his company CD Baby, he reduced the concept down to first principles. Sivers asked, What does a successful business need? His answer was happy customers.

Instead of focusing on garnering investors or having large offices, fancy systems, or huge numbers of staff, Sivers focused on making each of his customers happy. An example of this is his famous order confirmation email, part of which reads:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box money can buy.

By ignoring unnecessary details that cause many businesses to expend large amounts of money and time, Sivers was able to rapidly grow the company to $4 million in monthly revenue. In Anything You Want, Sivers wrote:

Having no funding was a huge advantage for me.
A year after I started CD Baby, the dot-com boom happened. Anyone with a little hot air and a vague plan was given millions of dollars by investors. It was ridiculous. …
Even years later, the desks were just planks of wood on cinder blocks from the hardware store. I made the office computers myself from parts. My well-funded friends would spend $100,000 to buy something I made myself for $1,000. They did it saying, “We need the very best,” but it didn’t improve anything for their customers. …
It’s counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.

To survive as a business, you need to treat your customers well. And yet so few of us master this principle.

Employing First Principles in Your Daily Life

Most of us have no problem thinking about what we want to achieve in life, at least when we’re young. We’re full of big dreams, big ideas, and boundless energy. The problem is that we let others tell us what’s possible, not only when it comes to our dreams but also when it comes to how we go after them. And when we let other people tell us what’s possible or what the best way to do something is, we outsource our thinking to someone else.

The real power of first-principles thinking is moving away from incremental improvement and into possibility. Letting others think for us means that we’re using their analogies, their conventions, and their possibilities. It means we’ve inherited a world that conforms to what they think. This is incremental thinking.

When we take what already exists and improve on it, we are in the shadow of others. It’s only when we step back, ask ourselves what’s possible, and cut through the flawed analogies that we see what is possible. Analogies are beneficial; they make complex problems easier to communicate and increase understanding. Using them, however, is not without a cost. They limit our beliefs about what’s possible and allow people to argue without ever exposing our (faulty) thinking. Analogies move us to see the problem in the same way that someone else sees the problem.

The gulf between what people currently see because their thinking is framed by someone else and what is physically possible is filled by the people who use first principles to think through problems.

First-principles thinking clears the clutter of what we’ve told ourselves and allows us to rebuild from the ground up. Sure, it’s a lot of work, but that’s why so few people are willing to do it. It’s also why the rewards for filling the chasm between possible and incremental improvement tend to be non-linear.

Let’s take a look at a few of the limiting beliefs that we tell ourselves.

“I don’t have a good memory.” [10]
People have far better memories than they think they do. Saying you don’t have a good memory is just a convenient excuse to let you forget. Taking a first-principles approach means asking how much information we can physically store in our minds. The answer is “a lot more than you think.” Now that we know it’s possible to put more into our brains, we can reframe the problem into finding the most optimal way to store information in our brains.

“There is too much information out there.”
A lot of professional investors read Farnam Street. When I meet these people and ask how they consume information, they usually fall into one of two categories. The differences between the two apply to all of us. The first type of investor says there is too much information to consume. They spend their days reading every press release, article, and blogger commenting on a position they hold. They wonder what they are missing. The second type of investor realizes that reading everything is unsustainable and stressful and makes them prone to overvaluing information they’ve spent a great amount of time consuming. These investors, instead, seek to understand the variables that will affect their investments. While there might be hundreds, there are usually three to five variables that will really move the needle. The investors don’t have to read everything; they just pay attention to these variables.

“All the good ideas are taken.”
A common way that people limit what’s possible is to tell themselves that all the good ideas are taken. Yet, people have been saying this for hundreds of years — literally — and companies keep starting and competing with different ideas, variations, and strategies.

“We need to move first.”
I’ve heard this in boardrooms for years. The answer isn’t as black and white as this statement. The iPhone wasn’t first, it was better. Microsoft wasn’t the first to sell operating systems; it just had a better business model. There is a lot of evidence showing that first movers in business are more likely to fail than latecomers. Yet this myth about the need to move first continues to exist.

Sometimes the early bird gets the worm and sometimes the first mouse gets killed. You have to break each situation down into its component parts and see what’s possible. That is the work of first-principles thinking.

“I can’t do that; it’s never been done before.”
People like Elon Musk are constantly doing things that have never been done before. This type of thinking is analogous to looking back at history and building, say, floodwalls, based on the worst flood that has happened before. A better bet is to look at what could happen and plan for that.

“As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.” — Harrington Emerson

Conclusion

The thoughts of others imprison us if we’re not thinking for ourselves.

Reasoning from first principles allows us to step outside of history and conventional wisdom and see what is possible. When you really understand the principles at work, you can decide if the existing methods make sense. Often they don’t.

Reasoning by first principles is useful when you are (1) doing something for the first time, (2) dealing with complexity, and (3) trying to understand a situation that you’re having problems with. In all of these areas, your thinking gets better when you stop making assumptions and you stop letting others frame the problem for you.

Analogies can’t replace understanding. While it’s easier on your brain to reason by analogy, you’re more likely to come up with better answers when you reason by first principles. This is what makes it one of the best sources of creative thinking. Thinking in first principles allows you to adapt to a changing environment, deal with reality, and seize opportunities that others can’t see.

Many people mistakenly believe that creativity is something that only some of us are born with, and either we have it or we don’t. Fortunately, there seems to be ample evidence that this isn’t true.[11]We’re all born rather creative, but during our formative years, it can be beaten out of us by busy parents and teachers. As adults, we rely on convention and what we’re told because that’s easier than breaking things down into first principles and thinking for ourselves. Thinking through first principles is a way of taking off the blinders. Most things suddenly seem more possible.

“I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can,” says Musk. “They sell themselves short without trying. One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

End Notes

[1] Aristotle, Physics 184a10–21

[2] Aristotle, Metaphysics 1013a14-15

[3] https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html

[4] Elon Musk, quoted by Tim Urban in “The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce,” Wait But Why https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html

[5] Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (p. 354)

[6] https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-s_3b5fRd8

[8] David Rowan, “How BuzzFeed mastered social sharing to become a media giant for a new era,” Wired.com. 2 January 2014. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/buzzfeed

[9] https://www.quora.com/What-does-Elon-Musk-mean-when-he-said-I-think-it%E2%80%99s-important-to-reason-from-first-principles-rather-than-by-analogy/answer/Bruce-Achterberg

[10] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-estimate-boosts-the-human-brain-s-memory-capacity-10-fold/

[11] Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today, George Land

[12]https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2rgsan/i_am_elon_musk_ceocto_of_a_rocket_company_ama/cnfre0a/

Being Critical is Not Thinking Critically

Updated March 1, 2023

Too often, people equate critical thinking with merely being skeptical of whatever they hear. Or they will interpret it to mean that, when confronted with someone who says something that they disagree with, they either:

  • Stop listening (and perhaps then start shouting)
  • Find a way to squeeze the statement into our pre-existing belief system (if we can’t we stop thinking about it)
  • Attempt to “educate” the speaker about why their statement or belief system is flawed. When this inevitably fails we stop speaking to them, at least about the subject in question.

Ultimately, each of these responses leaves us exactly where we started and indeed stunts our intellectual growth.

I confess that I do a, b, and c far too often (except I try not to really shout that much).

TIDAL Approach
TIDAL Approach

Critical Thinking Process

  • Step # 1 – Start with a Question
  • Step #2 – Pick a target, goal, or answer to the question.
  • Step #3 – Gather information that will help you set the best target or come up with the best answer.
    • List the facts, beliefs, paradigms, premises, and other conclusions supporting the proposed answer
    • Gather Evidence to help you best answer the question.
  • Step #4 – Make a decision
    • Independent of our agreement with the Answer we need to state our agreement or disagreement with the following:
      • Does the Proposed Answer follow from those premises?
      • Is the Answer “reasonable?”
      • Are the facts, beliefs, paradigms, premises, or other conclusions used to support the proposed answer “Reasonable?”
      • Based on the Above – assign a “reasonableness” value to the Answer
  • Step #5 – Act on the decision
    • Determine if the Answer causes you to change your beliefs or behavior.
    • If the answer causes you to change your behavior, develop a plan to change your behavior.
    • If the answer supports your current actions then add this answer to the list of confirming answeres.
  • Step #6 – Learn from the Process
    • Determine what you can learn from the process
      • If you cannot learn anything then you have determined that the process could be improved.
      • If you can learn something then find a way to retain that learning for future use.

Following this process is fairly easy. Coming up with the best answer is the hard part.

The challenge is overcoming the perceptual limitations caused by the way our brain works. Selective perception, confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and cultural/linguistic biases are real things that affect our decision-making.

The Difference between Debate and Dialog

It’s very important, to be able to critically question someone. But, that’s radically different from arguing merely to win.

Critical thinking is “debate” for the sake of better understanding, not just to win.

If you do debate right, there are no losers, only winners.

This lesson will introduce you to the elements of reasoning, universal intellectual standards, and intellectual traits through readings, discussions, and practical application activities.

You will practice strategies for Socratic discussions.

You will learn to consciously use critical thinking concepts and strategies in learning, and in your life.

As an outcome of this lesson, you will develop skills in:

  • Using the Elements of Reasoning and Intellectual Standards to create a critical thinking process that works well for you.
  • Using the Elements of Reasoning and Intellectual Standards to think through intellectual, academic, personal, social, and political problems.
  • Providing the intellectual tools you need to engage in fair-minded critical reasoning.

Critical Thinking: Tools for Taking Charge of Your Learning and Your Life

  • Whatever you are doing right now is determined by the way you are thinking. 
  • Whatever emotions you feel are determined by your thinking.
  • Whatever you want – all your desires – are determined by your thinking.
  • If your thinking is unrealistic, it will lead you to many disappointments.
  • If your thinking is overly pessimistic, it will deny you due recognition of the many things in which you should properly rejoice.   

Think of the “Stockdale Paradox.”

Since few people realize the powerful role that thinking plays in their lives, few gain significant command of it.

Most people are frequently victims of their thinking; that is, they are hurt rather than helped by it.

Most people are their own worst enemies. Their thinking is a continual source of problems, preventing them from recognizing opportunities, keeping them from exerting energy where it will do the best, poisoning relationships, and leading them down blind alleys.

This lesson introduces you to the tools the best thinkers use and will exemplify the activities and practice you can use to begin emulating them.

Here are some of the qualities of the best thinkers:

  • The best thinkers think about their thinking.    They do not take thinking for granted. They do not trust fate to make them good in thinking. They notice their thinking. They reflect on their thinking. They act upon their thinking.
  • The best thinkers are highly purposeful.    They do not simply act. They know why they act. They know what they are about. They have clear goals and clear priorities. They continually check their activities for alignment with their goals.
  • The best thinkers have intellectual “tools” that they use to raise the quality of their thinking.    They know how to express their thinking clearly. They know how to check it for accuracy and precision. They know how to keep focused on a question and make sure that it is relevant to their goals and purposes. They know how to think beneath the surface and how to expand their thinking to include insights from multiple perspectives. They know how to think logically about and significantly.
  • The best thinkers distinguish their thoughts from their feelings and desires.    They know that wanting something to be so does not make it so. They know that one can be unjustifiably angry, afraid, or insecure. They do not let unexamined emotions determine their decisions. They have “discovered” their minds, and they examine the way their minds operate as a result. They take deliberate charge of those operations.
  • The best thinkers routinely take thinking apart.    They “analyze” thinking. They do not trust the mind to analyze itself automatically. They realize that analyzing thinking is an art one must consciously learn. They realize that it takes knowledge of the parts of thinking, and practice in exercising control over them.
  • The best thinkers routinely evaluate thinking, determining its strengths and weaknesses.    They do not trust the mind to evaluate itself automatically. They realize that the automatic ways in which the mind evaluates itself are inherently flawed. They realize that evaluating thinking is an art one must consciously learn. They realize that it takes knowledge of the universal standards for thinking, and practice in exercising control over them.

This course, as a whole, will introduce you to the tools of mind that will help you reason well through the problems and issues you face – whether in the classroom, in your personal life, or in your professional life. If you take these ideas seriously, and practice using them, you can take command of the thinking that ultimately will command the quality of your life.

s an outcome of this course, you will develop skills in:

  • Demonstrate understanding of the importance of fair-minded critical thinking in the cultivation of fair-minded critical societies.
  • Demonstrate understanding of the parts of thinking, or ‘Elements of Thought,’ and how these parts work together in reasoning.
  • Demonstrate understanding of universal Intellectual Standards and their importance in human reasoning.
  • Demonstrate understanding of the barriers to critical thinking development, and of the ability to intervene in thinking to improve it.
  • Articulate and exemplify the primary concepts in critical thinking, and how they can be used as tools for understanding and improving human reasoning.
  • Articulate understanding of the problem of media bias and propaganda as a barrier to critical thought in human societies.
  • Demonstrate understanding of ethical reasoning, and show comprehension of the differences between ethics and other modes of thought – including religion, social ideologies, politics, and law.
  • Demonstrate abilities in close reading and substantive writing.

How to Infuse Critical Thinking Into Instruction [Part II – Advanced Course]

This course builds upon understandings learned in CT700.  Hence, CT700 is a prerequisite for this course. Our approach to critical thinking is designed to transform teaching and learning at all levels; it is based on the concepts and principles embedded in a substantive conception of critical thinking. The purpose of the course is to help instructors continue to internalize the intellectual tools they need if they are to foster intellectual skills, abilities, and characteristics in student thought.

In this course, we emphasize the importance of fostering a substantive conception of critical thinking. Such a conception not only highlights the qualities of the educated person, but also implies the proper design of the educational process. There are essential, minimal conditions for cultivating educated minds. These entail modes of instruction that foster development of the standards, abilities, and traits of the educated person.


As an outcome of this course, you will develop skills in:

  • Developing effective strategies for fostering fairminded critical thinking in instruction.
  • Leading more advanced Socratic dialog.
  • Deepening your understanding of the foundations of critical thinking.
  • Understanding the relationship between critical thinking and your own instruction
  • Beginning to outline a Thinker’s Guide to Critical Thinking within your field of study (showing proficiency in understanding the relationship between critical thinking and your field of study).
  • Understanding more deeply the concepts of close reading and substantive writing, in order to better foster these understandings in student thought.
  • Placing the concept of fairminded critical thinking at the heart of teaching and learning, including an explicit emphasis on the development of Intellectual Virtues.
  • Understanding the roles played by native human pathologies of thought in impeding intellectual development.
  • Redesigning lessons with critical thinking at the heart of teaching and learning processes.
  • Designing instructional assessment processes that dovetail with fostering critical thinking at every moment in teaching and learning.

Spring 2019 Registration Closed for CT701

Frequently Asked Questions

How do the courses work?

Our online courses are conducted in the @lantis® Learning Management System ( ALMS) Cloud.

The class has multiple ways to interact: Video Conferences, Discussion Threads, Web access to the Learning Library, iBooks, and PDFs.

How long do the courses last?

Once enrolled in a class you are in the class for life.

How much time do the courses require each week?

As much or as little as you want.

Who teaches the courses?

Each course is taught by an instructor educated in the Paul-Elder conception of critical thinking, under the direction of the Foundation’s Senior Fellows. Currently:

Is there academic credit available for the courses? 

Academic credit for the courses is available through Sonoma State University:

  • 3 units Philosophy credit

-or-

  • 4.5 CEUs of Nursing credit.

What are the course costs, and what do they cover? 

Registration feew cover costs for tuition, all course materials, and academic credit (should you wish to pursue it). The registration fee is $942 without credit; add $195 if you are taking the course for 3.0 Philosophy units, or $100 if you are taking it for 4.5 Nursing CEU’s.

Will I receive a certificate of completion? 

A certificate of completion can be provided upon request.

How will I receive my materials after I register for a course?

The course materials will be available online in a digital format.

What if I need to drop the course?

Please see the ‘Important Dates’ section at the top of this page.

SOCRATIC DISCUSSION PROCEDURES: The Socratic Discussion is patterned after the way Socrates conducted learning activities in Ancient Greece.

All of his students were expected to share their thoughts and opinions regarding the written and spoken word. Students were further required to read, analyze and evaluate assigned materials prior to class discussion.

Socrates remained silent to allow true discussion to flow from his students. Today, when a class is conducted using the Socratic Discussion method, students are also required to come prepared to discuss assigned materials and share ideas and opinions, using the text or real life experience to back up their answers.

Class Setup and Procedures for Socratic Discussion Students are arranged in two concentric circles. The inner circle contains the speakers who will be involved in the discussion.

The outer circle contains the listeners. Students in the outer circle are not to speak, but only to listen to the discussion.

Important: Two empty seats are reserved in the inner circle. Students in the outer circle have the option of joining the inner circle when:

Responsibilities of the inner circle members are to clear desks and display only prepared answers to the discussion questions.

  • the discussion appears to be off topic.
  • the discussion becomes nonproductive with arguments and “put downs.”
  • inner circle members have not discussed an area deemed important.

The final responsibility of the inner circle members:

  • Come to a consensus on each question
  • Simply make sure each member has had an opportunity to discuss answers to the assigned questions, and then perhaps agree to disagree.

The Social Dilemma Transcript – Main Arguments

The Social Dilemma is a 2020 American docudrama film directed by Jeff Orlowski and written by Orlowski, Davis Coombe, and Vickie Curtis.

The main argument made is that Social Media is Bad.

It focuses on:

  • Its exploitation of its users for financial gain through surveillance capitalism and data mining
  • Its design is meant to nurture an addiction
  • Its use in politics
  • Its effect on mental health (including the mental health of adolescents and rising teen suicide rates)
  • Its role in spreading conspiracy theories such as Pizzagate and aiding groups such as flat-earthers.

The film is a great bit of evidence to study as it features interviews with many former employees, executives, and other professionals from top tech companies and social media platforms, who provide their first-hand experiences of working in and around the tech industry.

While some interviewees state that social media platforms and big tech companies have been instrumental in providing positive change for society; they also note that such platforms have also caused problematic social, political, and cultural consequences.

This Video offers some good insight into how a social media algorithm powered by artificial intelligence may work.

Main Arguments

  • The Advertiser Model is inherently flawed.
  • It’s easy today to lose sight of the fact that these tools actually have created some wonderful things in the world. They’ve reunited lost family members. They’ve found organ donors. I mean, there were meaningful, systemic changes happening around the world because of these platforms that were positive! I think we were naive about the flip side of that coin.
  • Despite facing mounting criticism, the so-called Big Tech names are getting bigger.
  • Surveillance capitalism has come to shape our politics and culture in ways many people don’t perceive.
  • ISIS inspired followers online, and now white supremacists are doing the same.
  • We have gone from the information age into the disinformation age.
  • Our democracy is under assault.
  • The tools that have been created today are starting to erode the social fabric of how society works.”
  • never before in history have 50 designers—20- to 35-year-old white guys in California—made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people.
  • ever before in history have 50 designers—20- to 35-year-old white guys in California—made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people. Two billion people will have thoughts that they didn’t intend to have because a designer at Google said, “This is how notifications work on that screen that you wake up to in the morning.” And we have a moral responsibility, as Google, for solving this problem.
    • The argument here is that notifications are a problem because they give you thoughts you didn’t intend to have.  I disagree.
  • because we don’t pay for the products that we use, advertisers pay for the products that we use. Advertisers are the customers. We’re the thing being sold.
  • Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and companies like this, their business model is to keep people engaged on the screen. – That is my Goal too. I want people to spend time in my classes. A key metric I use to measure my websites is “Avg time on page.”
  • It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product. And that is the product. It’s the only possible product. There’s nothing else on the table that could possibly be called the product. That’s the only thing there is for them to make money from. Changing what you do, how you think, who you are.
    • I disagree – The goal could be to confirm your views not change them.  Preaching to the Choir. 

 

Main Facts

  • The first 50 years of Silicon Valley, the industry made products– hardware, software– sold ’em to customers. Nice, simple business. For the last ten years, the biggest companies in Silicon Valley have been in the business of selling their users.

Transcript

“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.”
—Sophocles

Cast:

[Bailey Richardson]
[Joe Toscano]
[Sandy Parakilas]
[Guillaume Chaslot]
[Lynn Fox]
[Aza Raskin] – Firefox & Mozilla Labs Former Employee, Center for Humane Technology Co-founder, Inventor – Infinite Scroll
[Alex Roetter]
[Tim Kendall]
[Jeff Seibert]
[Justin Rosenstein]
[Justin Harris]
[Jason Lanier] – Founding Father of Virtual Reality Computer Scientist
[Roger McNaee] – Facebook Early Investor Venture Capitalist

/the social dilemma_

[employee] Hello!

[presenter] Tristan Harris is a former design ethicist for Google and has been called the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience.

[reporter] He’s asking tech to bring what he calls “ethical design” to its products.

[Anderson Cooper] It’s rare for a tech insider to be so blunt, but Tristan Harris believes someone needs to be.

[Tristan] When I was at Google, I was on the Gmail team, and I just started getting burnt out ’cause we’d had so many conversations about… you know, what the inbox should look like and what color it should be, and… And I, you know, felt personally addicted to e-mail, and I found it fascinating there was no one at Gmail working on making it less addictive. And I was like, “Is anybody else thinking about this? I haven’t heard anybody talk about this.” And I was feeling this frustration… [sighs] …with the tech industry, overall, that we’d kind of, like, lost our way.

[Tristan] You know, I really struggled to try and figure out how, from the inside, we could change it.

[Tristan] And that was when I decided to make a presentation, kind of a call to arms. Every day, I went home and I worked on it for a couple hours every single night.

[Tristan] It basically just said, you know, never before in history have 50 designers—20- to 35-year-old white guys in California—made decisions that would have an impact on two billion people. Two billion people will have thoughts that they didn’t intend to have because a designer at Google said, “This is how notifications work on that screen that you wake up to in the morning.” And we have a moral responsibility, as Google, for solving this problem. And I sent this presentation to about 15, 20 of my closest colleagues at Google, and I was very nervous about it. I wasn’t sure how it was gonna land. When I went to work the next day, most of the laptops had the presentation open. Later that day, there was, like, 400 simultaneous viewers, so it just kept growing and growing. I got e-mails from all around the company. I mean, people in every department saying, “I totally agree.” “I see this affecting my kids.” “I see this affecting the people around me.” “We have to do something about this.” It felt like I was sort of launching a revolution or something like that. Later, I found out Larry Page had been notified about this presentation in three separate meetings that day.

[Tristan] And so, it created this kind of cultural moment that Google needed to take seriously.

[Tristan] And then… nothing.

[Tim Kendall] Everyone in 2006… including all of us at Facebook, just had total admiration for Google and what Google had built, which was this incredibly useful service that did, far as we could tell, lots of goodness for the world, and they built this parallel money machine. We had such envy for that, and it seemed so elegant to us… and so perfect. Facebook had been around for about two years, um, and I was hired to come in and figure out what the business model was gonna be for the company. I was the director of monetization. The point was, like, “You’re the person who’s gonna figure out how this thing monetizes.” And there were a lot of people who did a lot of the work, but I was clearly one of the people who was pointing towards… “Well, we have to make money, A… and I think this advertising model is probably the most elegant way.

 

[Jaron Lanier] Companies like Google and Facebook are some of the wealthiest and most successful of all time. Uh, they have relatively few employees. They just have this giant computer that rakes in money, right? Uh… Now, what are they being paid for? [chuckles] That’s a really important question.

[Roger McNamee] So, I’ve been an investor in technology for 35 years. The first 50 years of Silicon Valley, the industry made products– hardware, software– sold ’em to customers. Nice, simple business. For the last ten years, the biggest companies in Silicon Valley have been in the business of selling their users.

[Aza Raskin] It’s a little even trite to say now, but… because we don’t pay for the products that we use, advertisers pay for the products that we use. Advertisers are the customers. We’re the thing being sold.

[Tristan] The classic saying is: “If you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product.”

A lot of people think, you know, “Oh, well, Google’s just a search box, and Facebook’s just a place to see what my friends are doing and see their photos.” But what they don’t realize is they’re competing for your attention.

So, you know, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and companies like this, their business model is to keep people engaged on the screen.

[Justin Rosenstein] When you think about how some of these companies work, it starts to make sense. There are all these services on the Internet that we think of as free, but they’re not free. They’re paid for by advertisers. Why do advertisers pay those companies? They pay in exchange for showing their ads to us. We’re the product. Our attention is the product being sold to advertisers.

[Jaron] That’s a little too simplistic. It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product. And that is the product. It’s the only possible product. There’s nothing else on the table that could possibly be called the product. That’s the only thing there is for them to make money from. Changing what you do, how you think, who you are. It’s a gradual change. It’s slight. If you can go to somebody and you say, “Give me $10 million, and I will change the world one percent in the direction you want it to change…” It’s the world! That can be incredible, and that’s worth a lot of money.

[Shoshana Zuboff, PhD] This is what every business has always dreamt of: to have a guarantee that if it places an ad, it will be successful. That’s their business. They sell certainty. In order to be successful in that business, you have to have great predictions. Great predictions begin with one imperative: you need a lot of data.

[Tristan] Many people call this surveillance capitalism, capitalism profiting off of the infinite tracking of everywhere everyone goes by large technology companies whose business model is to make sure that advertisers are as successful as possible.

[Shoshana] This is a new kind of marketplace now. It’s a marketplace that never existed before. And it’s a marketplace that trades exclusively in human futures. Just like there are markets that trade in pork belly futures or oil futures. We now have markets that trade in human futures at scale, and those markets have produced the trillions of dollars that have made the Internet companies the richest companies in the history of humanity.

[Jeff Seibert] What I want people to know is that everything they’re doing online is being watched, is being tracked, is being measured. Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded. Exactly what image you stop and look at, for how long you look at it. Oh, yeah, seriously, for how long you look at it.

[Tristan] They know when people are lonely. They know when people are depressed. They know when people are looking at photos of your ex-romantic partners. They know what you’re doing late at night. They know the entire thing. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, or what kind of neuroses you have, what your personality type is like.

[Shoshana] They have more information about us than has ever been imagined in human history. It is unprecedented.

[Sandy Parakilas] And so, all of this data that we’re… that we’re just pouring out all the time is being fed into these systems that have almost no human supervision and that are making better and better and better and better predictions about what we’re gonna do and… and who we are.

[Aza] People have the misconception it’s our data being sold. It’s not in Facebook’s business interest to give up the data. What do they do with that data?

[Aza] They build models that predict our actions, and whoever has the best model wins.

[Tristan] At a lot of technology companies, there’s three main goals. There’s the engagement goal: to drive up your usage, to keep you scrolling. There’s the growth goal: to keep you coming back and inviting as many friends and getting them to invite more friends. And then there’s the advertising goal: to make sure that, as all that’s happening, we’re making as much money as possible from advertising.

Each of these goals are powered by algorithms whose job is to figure out what to show you to keep those numbers going up.

[Tim Kendall] We often talked about, at Facebook, this idea of being able to just dial that as needed. And, you know, we talked about having Mark have those dials. “Hey, I want more users in Korea today.” “Turn the dial.” “Let’s dial up the ads a little bit.” “Dial up monetization, just slightly.” And so, that happ– I mean, at all of these companies, there is that level of precision.

[Jaron] We’ve created a world in which online connection has become primary, especially for younger generations. And yet, in that world, any time two people connect, the only way it’s financed is through a sneaky third person who’s paying to manipulate those two people. So, we’ve created an entire global generation of people who are raised within a context where the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture, is manipulation. We’ve put deceit and sneakiness at the absolute center of everything we do.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
—Arthur C. Clarke

[Tristan] I was, like, five years old when I learned how to do magic. And I could fool adults, fully-grown adults with, like, PhDs. Magicians were almost like the first neuroscientists and psychologists. Like, they were the ones who first understood how people’s minds work. They just, in real time, are testing lots and lots of stuff on people. A magician understands something, some part of your mind that we’re not aware of. That’s what makes the illusion work. Doctors, lawyers, people who know how to build 747s or nuclear missiles, they don’t know more about how their own mind is vulnerable. That’s a separate discipline. And it’s a discipline that applies to all human beings.

[Tristan] From that perspective, you can have a very different understanding of what technology is doing. When I was at the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, this is what we learned. How could you use everything we know about the psychology of what persuades people and build that into technology?

[teacher] Now, many of you in the audience are geniuses already. I think that’s true, but my goal is to turn you into a behavior-change genius.

[Sandy] There are many prominent Silicon Valley figures who went through that class– key growth figures at Facebook and Uber and… and other companies– and learned how to make technology more persuasive, Tristan being one.

[Tristan] Persuasive technology is just sort of design intentionally applied to the extreme, where we really want to modify someone’s behavior. We want them to take this action. We want them to keep doing this with their finger.

[Joe Toscano] You pull down and you refresh, it’s gonna be a new thing at the top. Pull down and refresh again, it’s new. Every single time. Which, in psychology, we call a positive intermittent reinforcement.

[Tristan] You don’t know when you’re gonna get it or if you’re gonna get something, which operates just like the slot machines in Vegas. It’s not enough that you use the product consciously, I wanna dig down deeper into the brain stem and implant, inside of you, an unconscious habit so that you are being programmed at a deeper level. You don’t even realize it.

[Tristan] Every time you see it there on the counter, and you just look at it, and you know if you reach over, it just might have something for you, so you play that slot machine to see what you got, right? That’s not by accident. That’s a design technique.

[Tristan] When Facebook found that feature, they just dialed the hell out of that because they said, “This is gonna be a great way to grow activity. Let’s just get people tagging each other in photos all day long.”

[Tristan] There’s an entire discipline and field called “growth hacking.” Teams of engineers whose job is to hack people’s psychology so they can get more growth. They can get more user sign-ups, more engagement. They can get you to invite more people.

[Chamath Palihapitiya] After all the testing, all the iterating, all of this stuff, you know the single biggest thing we realized? Get any individual to seven friends in ten days. That was it.

[Sandy] Chamath was the head of growth at Facebook early on, and he’s very well known in the tech industry for pioneering a lot of the growth tactics that were used to grow Facebook at incredible speed. And those growth tactics have then become the standard playbook for Silicon Valley. They were used at Uber and at a bunch of other companies. One of the things that he pioneered was the use of scientific A/B testing of small feature changes. Companies like Google and Facebook would roll out lots of little, tiny experiments that they were constantly doing on users. And over time, by running these constant experiments, you… you develop the most optimal way to get users to do what you want them to do. It’s… It’s manipulation.

[interviewer] Uh, you’re making me feel like a lab rat.

[Sandy] You are a lab rat. We’re all lab rats. And it’s not like we’re lab rats for developing a cure for cancer. It’s not like they’re trying to benefit us. Right? We’re just zombies, and they want us to look at more ads so they can make more money.

[Shoshana] Facebook conducted what they called “massive-scale contagion experiments.”

[Shoshana] How do we use subliminal cues on the Facebook pages to get more people to go vote in the midterm elections? And they discovered that they were able to do that. One thing they concluded is that we now know we can affect real-world behavior and emotions without ever triggering the user’s awareness. They are completely clueless.

[Tristan] We’re pointing these engines of AI back at ourselves to reverse-engineer what elicits responses from us. Almost like you’re stimulating nerve cells on a spider to see what causes its legs to respond. So, it really is this kind of prison experiment where we’re just, you know, roping people into the matrix, and we’re just harvesting all this money and… and data from all their activity to profit from. And we’re not even aware that it’s happening.

[Chamath] So, we want to psychologically figure out how to manipulate you as fast as possible and then give you back that dopamine hit. We did that brilliantly at Facebook. Instagram has done it. WhatsApp has done it. You know, Snapchat has done it. Twitter has done it.

[Sean Parker] I mean, it’s exactly the kind of thing that a… that a hacker like myself would come up with because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in… in human psychology. [chuckles] And I just… I think that we… you know, the inventors, creators… uh, you know, and it’s me, it’s Mark, it’s the… you know, Kevin Systrom at Instagram… It’s all of these people… um, understood this consciously, and we did it anyway.

[Tristan] No one got upset when bicycles showed up. Right? Like, if everyone’s starting to go around on bicycles, no one said, “Oh, my God, we’ve just ruined society. [chuckles] Like, bicycles are affecting people. They’re pulling people away from their kids. They’re ruining the fabric of democracy. People can’t tell what’s true.” Like, we never said any of that stuff about a bicycle. If something is a tool, it genuinely is just sitting there, waiting patiently. If something is not a tool, it’s demanding things from you. It’s seducing you. It’s manipulating you. It wants things from you. And we’ve moved away from having a tools-based technology environment to an addiction- and manipulation-based technology environment. That’s what’s changed. Social media isn’t a tool that’s just waiting to be used. It has its own goals, and it has its own means of pursuing them by using your psychology against you.

“There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’:
illegal drugs and software.”
—Edward Tufte

[Tim] Rewind a few years ago, I was the… I was the president of Pinterest. I was coming home, and I couldn’t get off my phone once I got home, despite having two young kids who needed my love and attention. I was in the pantry, you know, typing away on an e-mail or sometimes looking at Pinterest. I thought, “God, this is classic irony. I am going to work during the day and building something that then I am falling prey to.” And I couldn’t… I mean, some of those moments, I couldn’t help myself.

[Tim] Well, I mean, it’s sort– it’s interesting that knowing what was going on behind the curtain, I still wasn’t able to control my usage. So, that’s a little scary.

[Jeff] Even knowing how these tricks work, I’m still susceptible to them. I’ll still pick up the phone, and 20 minutes will disappear.

[Roger] Do you check your smartphone before you pee in the morning or while you’re peeing in the morning? ‘Cause those are the only two choices.

[Tim] I tried through willpower, just pure willpower… “I’ll put down my phone, I’ll leave my phone in the car when I get home.” I think I told myself a thousand times, a thousand different days, “I am not gonna bring my phone to the bedroom,” and then 9:00 p.m. rolls around. “Well, I wanna bring my phone in the bedroom.” [takes a deep breath] And so, that was sort of… Willpower was kind of attempt one, and then attempt two was, you know, brute force.

[Dr. Anna Lembke] So, here’s the thing. Social media is a drug. I mean, we have a basic biological imperative to connect with other people. That directly affects the release of dopamine in the reward pathway. Millions of years of evolution, um, are behind that system to get us to come together and live in communities, to find mates, to propagate our species. So, there’s no doubt that a vehicle like social media, which optimizes this connection between people, is going to have the potential for addiction.

[Tristan] These technology products were not designed by child psychologists who are trying to protect and nurture children. They were just designing to make these algorithms that were really good at recommending the next video to you or really good at getting you to take a photo with a filter on it.

[Tristan] It’s not just that it’s controlling where they spend their attention. Especially social media starts to dig deeper and deeper down into the brain stem and take over kids’ sense of self-worth and identity.

[Tristan] We evolved to care about whether other people in our tribe… think well of us or not ’cause it matters. But were we evolved to be aware of what 10,000 people think of us? We were not evolved to have social approval being dosed to us every five minutes. That was not at all what we were built to experience.

[Chamath] We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded in these short-term signals– hearts, likes, thumbs-up– and we conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth. And instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity… that’s short-term and that leaves you even more, and admit it, vacant and empty before you did it. Because then it forces you into this vicious cycle where you’re like, “What’s the next thing I need to do now? ‘Cause I need it back.” Think about that compounded by two billion people, and then think about how people react then to the perceptions of others. It’s just a… It’s really bad. It’s really, really bad.

[Jonathan Haidt, PhD] There has been a gigantic increase in depression and anxiety for American teenagers which began right around… between 2011 and 2013. The number of teenage girls out of 100,000 in this country who were admitted to a hospital every year because they cut themselves or otherwise harmed themselves, that number was pretty stable until around 2010, 2011, and then it begins going way up.

It’s up 62 percent for older teen girls. It’s up 189 percent for the preteen girls. That’s nearly triple. Even more horrifying, we see the same pattern with suicide. The older teen girls, 15 to 19 years old, they’re up 70 percent, compared to the first decade of this century. The preteen girls, who have very low rates to begin with, they are up 151 percent. And that pattern points to social media.  Gen Z, the kids born after 1996 or so, those kids are the first generation in history that got on social media in middle school.

[Jonathan] How do they spend their time? They come home from school, and they’re on their devices. A whole generation is more anxious, more fragile, more depressed.

[Jonathan] They’re much less comfortable taking risks. The rates at which they get driver’s licenses have been dropping. The number who have ever gone out on a date or had any kind of romantic interaction is dropping rapidly. This is a real change in a generation. And remember, for every one of these, for every hospital admission, there’s a family that is traumatized and horrified.

[Tim] It’s plain as day to me. These services are killing people… and causing people to kill themselves.

[Tristan] I don’t know any parent who says, “Yeah, I really want my kids to be growing up feeling manipulated by tech designers, uh, manipulating their attention, making it impossible to do their homework, making them compare themselves to unrealistic standards of beauty.” Like, no one wants that. [chuckles] No one does. We… We used to have these protections. When children watched Saturday morning cartoons, we cared about protecting children. We would say, “You can’t advertise to these age children in these ways.” But then you take YouTube for Kids, and it gobbles up that entire portion of the attention economy, and now all kids are exposed to YouTube for Kids. And all those protections and all those regulations are gone.

[Tristan] We’re training and conditioning a whole new generation of people… that when we are uncomfortable or lonely or uncertain or afraid, we have a digital pacifier for ourselves that is kind of atrophying our own ability to deal with that.

[Tristan] Photoshop didn’t have 1,000 engineers on the other side of the screen, using notifications, using your friends, using AI to predict what’s gonna perfectly addict you, or hook you, or manipulate you, or allow advertisers to test 60,000 variations of text or colors to figure out what’s the perfect manipulation of your mind. This is a totally new species of power and influence.

I… I would say, again, the methods used to play on people’s ability to be addicted or to be influenced may be different this time, and they probably are different. They were different when newspapers came in and the printing press came in, and they were different when television came in, and you had three major networks and…

[Tristan] At the time.

At the time. That’s what I’m saying. But I’m saying the idea that there’s a new level and that new level has happened so many times before. I mean, this is just the latest new level that we’ve seen.

[Tristan] There’s this narrative that, you know, “We’ll just adapt to it. We’ll learn how to live with these devices, just like we’ve learned how to live with everything else.” And what this misses is there’s something distinctly new here.

[Randima (Randy) Fernando] Perhaps the most dangerous piece of all this is the fact that it’s driven by technology that’s advancing exponentially. Roughly, if you say from, like, the 1960s to today, processing power has gone up about a trillion times. Nothing else that we have has improved at anything near that rate. Like, cars are, you know, roughly twice as fast. And almost everything else is negligible. And perhaps most importantly, our human– our physiology, our brains have evolved not at all.

[Tristan] Human beings, at a mind and body and sort of physical level, are not gonna fundamentally change.

[indistinct chatter]

[chuckling] I know, but they…

[continues speaking indistinctly]

[camera shutter clicks]

[Tristan] We can do genetic engineering and develop new kinds of human beings, but realistically speaking, you’re living inside of hardware, a brain, that was, like, millions of years old, and then there’s this screen, and then on the opposite side of the screen, there’s these thousands of engineers and supercomputers that have goals that are different than your goals, and so, who’s gonna win in that game? Who’s gonna win?

[yellow AI] How are we losing?

I don’t know.

Where is he? This is not normal.

[Green AI] Did I overwhelm him with friends and family content?

Probably.

Well, maybe it was all the ads.

No. Something’s very wrong.

Let’s switch to resurrection mode.

[Tristan] When you think of AI, you know, an AI’s gonna ruin the world, and you see, like, a Terminator, and you see Arnold Schwarzenegger.

[Terminator] I’ll be back.

[Tristan] You see drones, and you think, like, “Oh, we’re gonna kill people with AI.” And what people miss is that AI already runs today’s world right now.

[Justin Rosenstein] Even talking about “an AI” is just a metaphor. At these companies like… like Google, there’s just massive, massive rooms, some of them underground, some of them underwater, of just computers. Tons and tons of computers, as far as the eye can see. They’re deeply interconnected with each other and running extremely complicated programs, sending information back and forth between each other all the time. And they’ll be running many different programs, many different products on those same machines. Some of those things could be described as simple algorithms, some could be described as algorithms that are so complicated, you would call them intelligence.

[crew member sighs]

[Cathy O’Neil, PhD] I like to say that algorithms are opinions embedded in code… and that algorithms are not objective. Algorithms are optimized to some definition of success. So, if you can imagine, if a… if a commercial enterprise builds an algorithm to their definition of success, it’s a commercial interest. It’s usually profit.

[Jeff Seibert] You are giving the computer the goal state, “I want this outcome,” and then the computer itself is learning how to do it. That’s where the term “machine learning” comes from. And so, every day, it gets slightly better at picking the right posts in the right order so that you spend longer and longer in that product. And no one really understands what they’re doing in order to achieve that goal.

[Bailey Richardson] The algorithm has a mind of its own, so even though a person writes it, it’s written in a way that you kind of build the machine, and then the machine changes itself.

[Sandy Parakilas] There’s only a handful of people at these companies, at Facebook and Twitter and other companies… There’s only a few people who understand how those systems work, and even they don’t necessarily fully understand what’s gonna happen with a particular piece of content. So, as humans, we’ve almost lost control over these systems. Because they’re controlling, you know, the information that we see, they’re controlling us more than we’re controlling them.

[console whirs]

[Growth AI] Cross-referencing him against comparables in his geographic zone. His psychometric doppelgangers. There are 13,694 people behaving just like him in his region.

[Blue AI] What’s trending with them?

[Yellow AI] We need something actually good for a proper resurrection, given that the typical stuff isn’t working. Not even that cute girl from school.

[Blue AI] My analysis shows that going political with Extreme Center content has a 62.3 percent chance of long-term engagement.

[Yellow AI] That’s not bad.

[Blue AI] [sighs] It’s not good enough to lead with.

[Growth AI] Okay, okay, so we’ve tried notifying him about tagged photos, invitations, current events, even a direct message from Rebecca. But what about User 01265923010?

[Blue AI] Yeah, Ben loved all of her posts. For months and, like, literally all of them, and then nothing.

[Growth AI] I calculate a 92.3 percent chance of resurrection with a notification about Ana.

[Blue AI] And her new friend.

[eerie instrumental music playing]

[cell phone vibrates]

[Ben] Oh, you gotta be kiddin’ me. Uh… [sighs] Okay. What?

[fanfare plays, fireworks pop]

[Blue AI] [claps] Bam! We’re back!

[Yellow AI] Let’s get back to making money, boys.

[Growth AI] Yes, and connecting Ben with the entire world.

[Blue AI] I’m giving him access to all the information he might like.

[Growth AI] Hey, do you guys ever wonder if, you know, like, the feed is good for Ben?

[Blue AI] No.

[Yellow AI] No. [chuckles slightly]

[Growth AI] [chuckles softly]

[“I Put a Spell on You” playing]

♪ I put a spell on you ♪

♪ ‘Cause you’re mine ♪

[vocalizing] ♪ Ah! ♪

♪ You better stop the things you do ♪

♪ I ain’t lyin’ ♪

♪ No, I ain’t lyin’ ♪

♪ You know I can’t stand it ♪

♪ You’re runnin’ around ♪

♪ You know better, Daddy ♪

♪ I can’t stand it
‘Cause you put me down ♪

♪ Yeah, yeah ♪

♪ I put a spell on you ♪

♪ Because you’re mine ♪

♪ You’re mine ♪

[Roger] So, imagine you’re on Facebook… and you’re effectively playing against this artificial intelligence that knows everything about you, can anticipate your next move, and you know literally nothing about it, except that there are cat videos and birthdays on it. That’s not a fair fight.

[Cass] Ben and Jerry, it’s time to go, bud! [sighs] Ben? [knocks lightly on door] Ben.

[Ben] Mm.

[Cass] Come on. School time. [claps] Let’s go.

[Ben sighs]

[Center for Humane Technology]

[excited chatter]

[tech] How you doing today?

[Tristan] Oh, I’m… I’m nervous.

[tech] Are ya?

[Tristan] Yeah. [chuckles]

[Tristan] We were all looking for the moment when technology would overwhelm human strengths and intelligence. When is it gonna cross the singularity, replace our jobs, be smarter than humans? But there’s this much earlier moment… when technology exceeds and overwhelms human weaknesses. This point being crossed is at the root of addiction, polarization, radicalization, outrage-ification, vanity-ification, the entire thing. This is overpowering human nature, and this is checkmate on humanity.

[Cass] [sighs deeply]

[door opens]

[Ben] I’m sorry. [sighs]

[seat belt clicks]

[engine starts]

[Jaron] One of the ways I try to get people to understand just how wrong feeds from places like Facebook are is to think about the Wikipedia. When you go to a page, you’re seeing the same thing as other people. So, it’s one of the few things online that we at least hold in common. Now, just imagine for a second that Wikipedia said, “We’re gonna give each person a different customized definition, and we’re gonna be paid by people for that.” So, Wikipedia would be spying on you. Wikipedia would calculate, “What’s the thing I can do to get this person to change a little bit on behalf of some commercial interest?” Right? And then it would change the entry. Can you imagine that? Well, you should be able to, ’cause that’s exactly what’s happening on Facebook. It’s exactly what’s happening in your YouTube feed.

[Justin] When you go to Google and type in “Climate change is,” you’re going to see different results depending on where you live. In certain cities, you’re gonna see it autocomplete with “climate change is a hoax.” In other cases, you’re gonna see “climate change is causing the destruction of nature.” And that’s a function not of what the truth is about climate change, but about where you happen to be Googling from and the particular things Google knows about your interests.

[Tristan] Even two friends who are so close to each other, who have almost the exact same set of friends, they think, you know, “I’m going to news feeds on Facebook. I’ll see the exact same set of updates.” But it’s not like that at all. They see completely different worlds because they’re based on these computers calculating what’s perfect for each of them.

[whistling over monitor]

[Roger] The way to think about it is it’s 2.7 billion Truman Shows. Each person has their own reality, with their own… facts.

[Clip from The Truman Show]
Why do you think that, uh, Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world until now?
We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.

[Roger] Over time, you have the false sense that everyone agrees with you, because everyone in your news feed sounds just like you. And that once you’re in that state, it turns out you’re easily manipulated, the same way you would be manipulated by a magician. A magician shows you a card trick and says, “Pick a card, any card.” What you don’t realize was that they’ve done a set-up, so you pick the card they want you to pick. And that’s how Facebook works. Facebook sits there and says, “Hey, you pick your friends. You pick the links that you follow.” But that’s all nonsense. It’s just like the magician. Facebook is in charge of your news feed.

[Rashida Richardson] We all simply are operating on a different set of facts. When that happens at scale, you’re no longer able to reckon with or even consume information that contradicts with that world view that you’ve created. That means we aren’t actually being objective, constructive individuals. [chuckles]

[crowd chanting] Open up your eyes, don’t believe the lies! Open up…

[Justin] And then you look over at the other side, and you start to think, “How can those people be so stupid? Look at all of this information that I’m constantly seeing. How are they not seeing that same information?” And the answer is, “They’re not seeing that same information.”

[crowd continues chanting] Open up your eyes, don’t believe the lies!

[shouting indistinctly]

[interviewer] What are Republicans like?

People that don’t have a clue.

The Democrat Party is a crime syndicate, not a real political party.

A huge new Pew Research Center study of 10,000 American adults finds us more divided than ever, with personal and political polarization at a 20-year high.

[pundit] You have more than a third of Republicans saying the Democratic Party is a threat to the nation, more than a quarter of Democrats saying the same thing about the Republicans.

[Justin] So many of the problems that we’re discussing, like, around political polarization exist in spades on cable television. The media has this exact same problem, where their business model, by and large, is that they’re selling our attention to advertisers. And the Internet is just a new, even more efficient way to do that.

[Guillaume Chaslot] At YouTube, I was working on YouTube recommendations. It worries me that an algorithm that I worked on is actually increasing polarization in society. But from the point of view of watch time, this polarization is extremely efficient at keeping people online.

[vlogger] The only reason these teachers are teaching this stuff is ’cause they’re getting paid to. It’s absolutely absurd.

[Cass] Hey, Benji. No soccer practice today?

[Ben] Oh, there is. I’m just catching up on some news stuff.

[vlogger] Do research. Anything that sways from the Extreme Center–

[Cass] Wouldn’t exactly call the stuff that you’re watching news.

[Ben] You’re always talking about how messed up everything is. So are they.

[Cass] But that stuff is just propaganda.

[vlogger] Neither is true. It’s all about what makes sense.

[Cass] Ben, I’m serious. That stuff is bad for you. You should go to soccer practice.

[Ben] Mm.

[Cass sighs]

[vlogger] I share this stuff because I care. I care that you are being misled, and it’s not okay. All right?

[Guillaume] People think the algorithm is designed to give them what they really want, only it’s not. The algorithm is actually trying to find a few rabbit holes that are very powerful, trying to find which rabbit hole is the closest to your interest. And then if you start watching one of those videos, then it will recommend it over and over again.

[Tristan] It’s not like anybody wants this to happen. It’s just that this is what the recommendation system is doing. So much so that Kyrie Irving, the famous basketball player, uh, said he believed the Earth was flat, and he apologized later because he blamed it on a YouTube rabbit hole.

[Kyrie Irving] You know, like, you click the YouTube click and it goes, like, how deep the rabbit hole goes.

[Tristan] When he later came on to NPR to say, “I’m sorry for believing this. I didn’t want to mislead people,” a bunch of students in a classroom were interviewed saying, “The round-Earthers got to him.”

[audience chuckles]

[Guillaume] The flat-Earth conspiracy theory was recommended hundreds of millions of times by the algorithm. It’s easy to think that it’s just a few stupid people who get convinced, but the algorithm is getting smarter and smarter every day. So, today, they are convincing the people that the Earth is flat, but tomorrow, they will be convincing you of something that’s false.

[reporter] On November 7th, the hashtag “Pizzagate” was born.

[Renée Diresta] Pizzagate… [clicks tongue] Oh, boy. Uh… [laughs] I still am not 100 percent sure how this originally came about, but the idea that ordering a pizza meant ordering a trafficked person. As the groups got bigger on Facebook, Facebook’s recommendation engine started suggesting to regular users that they join Pizzagate groups. So, if a user was, for example, anti-vaccine or believed in chemtrails or had indicated to Facebook’s algorithms in some way that they were prone to belief in conspiracy theories, Facebook’s recommendation engine would serve them Pizzagate groups. Eventually, this culminated in a man showing up with a gun, deciding that he was gonna go liberate the children from the basement of the pizza place that did not have a basement.

[officer 1] What were you doing?

[man] Making sure there was nothing there.

[officer 1] Regarding?

[man] Pedophile ring.

[officer 1] What?

[man] Pedophile ring.

[officer 2] He’s talking about Pizzagate.

[Renée] This is an example of a conspiracy theory that was propagated across all social networks. The social network’s own recommendation engine is voluntarily serving this up to people who had never searched for the term “Pizzagate” in their life.

[Tristan] There’s a study, an MIT study, that fake news on Twitter spreads six times faster than true news. What is that world gonna look like when one has a six-times advantage to the other one?

[Aza Raskin] You can imagine these things are sort of like… they… they tilt the floor of… of human behavior. They make some behavior harder and some easier. And you’re always free to walk up the hill, but fewer people do, and so, at scale, at society’s scale, you really are just tilting the floor and changing what billions of people think and do.

[Sandy] We’ve created a system that biases towards false information. Not because we want to, but because false information makes the companies more money than the truth. The truth is boring.

[Tristan] It’s a disinformation-for-profit business model. You make money the more you allow unregulated messages to reach anyone for the best price.

[vlogger] Because climate change? Yeah. It’s a hoax. Yeah, it’s real. That’s the point. The more they talk about it and the more they divide us, the more they have the power, the more…

[Tristan] Facebook has trillions of these news feed posts. They can’t know what’s real or what’s true… which is why this conversation is so critical right now.

[reporter 1] It’s not just COVID-19 that’s spreading fast. There’s a flow of misinformation online about the virus.

[reporter 2] The notion drinking water will flush coronavirus from your system is one of several myths about the virus circulating on social media.

[automated voice] The government planned this event, created the virus, and had a simulation of how the countries would react.

Coronavirus is a… a hoax.

[man] SARS, coronavirus. And look at when it was made. 2018.

I think the US government started this shit.

Nobody is sick. Nobody is sick. Nobody knows anybody who’s sick.

Maybe the government is using the coronavirus as an excuse to get everyone to stay inside because something else is happening.

Coronavirus is not killing people, it’s the 5G radiation that they’re pumping out.

[crowd shouting]

[Tristan] We’re being bombarded with rumors. People are blowing up actual physical cell phone towers. We see Russia and China spreading rumors and conspiracy theories.

[reporter 3] This morning, panic and protest in Ukraine as…

[Tristan] People have no idea what’s true, and now it’s a matter of life and death.

[woman] Those sources that are spreading coronavirus misinformation have amassed something like 52 million engagements.

You’re saying that silver solution would be effective.

Well, let’s say it hasn’t been tested on this strain of the coronavirus, but…

[Tristan] What we’re seeing with COVID is just an extreme version of what’s happening across our information ecosystem. Social media amplifies exponential gossip and exponential hearsay to the point that we don’t know what’s true, no matter what issue we care about.

[teacher] He discovers this.

[continues lecturing indistinctly]

[Rebecca whispers] Ben.

[Rebecca] Are you still on the team?

[Ben] Mm-hmm.

[Rebecca] Okay, well, I’m gonna get a snack before practice if you… wanna come.

[Ben] Hm?

[Rebecca] You know, never mind.

[footsteps fading]

[vlogger] Nine out of ten people are dissatisfied right now. The EC is like any political movement in history, when you think about it. We are standing up, and we are… we are standing up to this noise. You are my people. I trust you guys.

[Blue AI] The Extreme Center content is brilliant.

[Green AI] He absolutely loves it.

[Yellow AI] Running an auction. 840 bidders. He sold for 4.35 cents to a weapons manufacturer.

[Blue AI] Let’s promote some of these events. Upcoming rallies in his geographic zone later this week.

[Green AI] I’ve got a new vlogger lined up, too.

[chuckles]

[vlogger] And… and, honestly, I’m telling you, I’m willing to do whatever it takes. And I mean whatever. Subscribe…

[Cass] Ben?

[vlogger] …and also come back because I’m telling you, yo…

[knocking on door]

[vlogger] …I got some real big things comin’. Some real big things.

[Roger] One of the problems with Facebook is that, as a tool of persuasion, it may be the greatest thing ever created. Now, imagine what that means in the hands of a dictator or an authoritarian. If you want to control the population of your country, there has never been a tool as effective as Facebook.

[Cynthia M. Wong] Some of the most troubling implications of governments and other bad actors weaponizing social media, um, is that it has led to real, offline harm. I think the most prominent example that’s gotten a lot of press is what’s happened in Myanmar. In Myanmar, when people think of the Internet, what they are thinking about is Facebook. And what often happens is when people buy their cell phone, the cell phone shop owner will actually preload Facebook on there for them and open an account for them. And so when people get their phone, the first thing they open and the only thing they know how to open is Facebook.

[CBSN News] Well, a new bombshell investigation exposes Facebook’s growing struggle to tackle hate speech in Myanmar.

[crowd shouting]

[Cynthia] Facebook really gave the military and other bad actors a new way to manipulate public opinion and to help incite violence against the Rohingya Muslims that included mass killings, burning of entire villages, mass rape, and other serious crimes against humanity that have now led to 700,000 Rohingya Muslims having to flee the country.

[Renée Diresta] It’s not that highly motivated propagandists haven’t existed before. It’s that the platforms make it possible to spread manipulative narratives with phenomenal ease, and without very much money.

[Tristan] If I want to manipulate an election, I can now go into a conspiracy theory group on Facebook, and I can find 100 people who believe that the Earth is completely flat and think it’s all this conspiracy theory that we landed on the moon, and I can tell Facebook, “Give me 1,000 users who look like that.” Facebook will happily send me thousands of users that look like them that I can now hit with more conspiracy theories.

[Yellow AI] Sold for 3.4 cents an impression.

[Blue AI] New EC video to promote.

[Advertising/Yellow AI] Another ad teed up.

[Justin] Algorithms and manipulative politicians are becoming so expert at learning how to trigger us, getting so good at creating fake news that we absorb as if it were reality, and confusing us into believing those lies. It’s as though we have less and less control over who we are and what we believe.

[ominous instrumental music playing]

[vlogger] …so they can pick sides. There’s lies here, and there’s lies over there. So they can keep the power, so they can control everything.

[police siren blaring]

[vlogger] They can control our minds, so that they can keep their secrets.

[crowd chanting]

[Tristan] Imagine a world where no one believes anything true. Everyone believes the government’s lying to them. Everything is a conspiracy theory. “I shouldn’t trust anyone. I hate the other side.” That’s where all this is heading.

[News] The political earthquakes in Europe continue to rumble. This time, in Italy and Spain.

[reporter] Overall, Europe’s traditional, centrist coalition lost its majority while far right and far left populist parties made gains.

[man shouts]

[crowd chanting]

[Police woman] Back up.

[radio beeps]

Okay, let’s go.

[police siren wailing]

[reporter] These accounts were deliberately, specifically attempting to sow political discord in Hong Kong.

[crowd shouting]

[sighs]

[Cass] All right, Ben.

[car doors lock]

[CNN] What does it look like to be a country that’s entire diet is Facebook and social media?
[Maria A. Ressa] Democracy crumbled quickly. Six months.

[reporter 1] After that chaos in Chicago, violent clashes between protesters and supporters…

[reporter 2] Democracy is facing a crisis of confidence.

[Renée] What we’re seeing is a global assault on democracy.

[crowd shouting]

[Renée] Most of the countries that are targeted are countries that run democratic elections.

[Tristan] This is happening at scale. By state actors, by people with millions of dollars saying, “I wanna destabilize Kenya. I wanna destabilize Cameroon. Oh, Angola? That only costs this much.”

[reporter] An extraordinary election took place Sunday in Brazil.

[News] With a campaign that’s been powered by social media.

[crowd chanting in Portuguese]

[Tristan] We in the tech industry have created the tools to destabilize and erode the fabric of society in every country, all at once, everywhere.

[Joe Toscano] You have this in Germany, Spain, France, Brazil, Australia. Some of the most “developed nations” in the world are now imploding on each other, and what do they have in common?

[Interviewer] Knowing what you know now, do you believe Facebook impacted the results of the 2016 election?

[Mark Zuckerberg] Oh, that’s… that is hard. You know, it’s… the… the reality is, well, there were so many different forces at play.

[CBSN News] Representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google are back on Capitol Hill for a second day of testimony about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

[Roger] The manipulation by third parties is not a hack. Right? The Russians didn’t hack Facebook. What they did was they used the tools that Facebook created for legitimate advertisers and legitimate users, and they applied it to a nefarious purpose.

[Tristan] It’s like remote-control warfare. One country can manipulate another one without actually invading its physical borders.

[reporter 1] We’re seeing violent images. It appears to be a dumpster being pushed around…

[Tristan] But it wasn’t about who you wanted to vote for. It was about sowing total chaos and division in society.

[reporter 2] Now, this was in Huntington Beach. A march…

[Tristan] It’s about making two sides who couldn’t hear each other anymore, who didn’t want to hear each other anymore, who didn’t trust each other anymore.

[reporter 3] This is a city where hatred was laid bare and transformed into racial violence.

[crowd shouting]

[indistinct shouting]

[men grunting]

[police siren blaring]

[Cass] Ben!

[Ben] Cassandra! Cass!

[Cass] Ben!

[officer 1] Come here! Come here! Arms up. Arms up. Get down on your knees. Now, down.

[crowd continues shouting]

[officer 2] Calm–

[Cass] Ben!

[officer 2] Hey! Hands up! Turn around. On the ground. On the ground!

[crowd echoing]

[melancholy piano music playing]

[siren continues wailing]

[Tristan] Do we want this system for sale to the highest bidder? For democracy to be completely for sale, where you can reach any mind you want, target a lie to that specific population, and create culture wars? Do we want that?

[Marco Rubio] We are a nation of people… that no longer speak to each other. We are a nation of people who have stopped being friends with people because of who they voted for in the last election. We are a nation of people who have isolated ourselves to only watch channels that tell us that we’re right.

[Jeff Flake] My message here today is that tribalism is ruining us. It is tearing our country apart. It is no way for sane adults to act.

[Roger] If everyone’s entitled to their own facts, there’s really no need for compromise, no need for people to come together. In fact, there’s really no need for people to interact. We need to have… some shared understanding of reality. Otherwise, we aren’t a country.

[Mark Zuckerberg] So, uh, long-term, the solution here is to build more AI tools that find patterns of people using the services that no real person would do.

[Cathy O’Neil] We are allowing the technologists to frame this as a problem that they’re equipped to solve. That is… That’s a lie. People talk about AI as if it will know truth. AI’s not gonna solve these problems. AI cannot solve the problem of fake news. Google doesn’t have the option of saying, “Oh, is this conspiracy? Is this truth?” Because they don’t know what truth is. They don’t have a… They don’t have a proxy for truth that’s better than a click.

[Tristan] If we don’t agree on what is true or that there is such a thing as truth, we’re toast. This is the problem beneath other problems because if we can’t agree on what’s true, then we can’t navigate out of any of our problems.

[ominous instrumental music playing]

[console droning]

[Growth AI] We should suggest Flat Earth Football Club.

[Engagement AI] Don’t show him sports updates. He doesn’t engage.

[AIs speaking indistinctly]

[music swells]

[Jaron] A lot of people in Silicon Valley subscribe to some kind of theory that we’re building some global super brain, and all of our users are just interchangeable little neurons, no one of which is important. And it subjugates people into this weird role where you’re just, like, this little computing element that we’re programming through our behavior manipulation for the service of this giant brain, and you don’t matter. You’re not gonna get paid. You’re not gonna get acknowledged. You don’t have self-determination. We’ll sneakily just manipulate you because you’re a computing node, so we need to program you ’cause that’s what you do with computing nodes.

[reflective instrumental music playing]

[Tristan] Oh, man. [sighs]

[Tristan] When you think about technology and it being an existential threat, you know, that’s a big claim, and… it’s easy to then, in your mind, think, “Okay, so, there I am with the phone… scrolling, clicking, using it. Like, where’s the existential threat? Okay, there’s the supercomputer. The other side of the screen, pointed at my brain, got me to watch one more video. Where’s the existential threat?”

[indistinct chatter]

[Tristan] It’s not about the technology being the existential threat. It’s the technology’s ability to bring out the worst in society… [chuckles] …and the worst in society being the existential threat. If technology creates… mass chaos, outrage, incivility, lack of trust in each other, loneliness, alienation, more polarization, more election hacking, more populism, more distraction and inability to focus on the real issues… that’s just society. [scoffs] And now society is incapable of healing itself and just devolving into a kind of chaos.

[Tristan] This affects everyone, even if you don’t use these products. These things have become digital Frankensteins that are terraforming the world in their image, whether it’s the mental health of children or our politics and our political discourse, without taking responsibility for taking over the public square. So, again, it comes back to–

[Dan Sullivan] And who do you think’s responsible?

[Tristan] I think we have to have the platforms be responsible for when they take over election advertising, they’re responsible for protecting elections. When they take over mental health of kids or Saturday morning, they’re responsible for protecting Saturday morning.

[Tristan] The race to keep people’s attention isn’t going away. Our technology’s gonna become more integrated into our lives, not less. The AIs are gonna get better at predicting what keeps us on the screen, not worse at predicting what keeps us on the screen.

[Jon Tester] I… I am 62 years old, getting older every minute, the more this conversation goes on…

[crowd chuckles]

…but… but I will tell you that, um… I’m probably gonna be dead and gone, and I’ll probably be thankful for it, when all this shit comes to fruition. Because… Because I think that this scares me to death. Do… Do you… Do you see it the same way? Or am I overreacting to a situation that I don’t know enough about?

[interviewer] What are you most worried about?

[Tim] [sighs] I think, in the… in the shortest time horizon… civil war.

[Jaron] If we go down the current status quo for, let’s say, another 20 years… we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance. We probably fail to meet the challenge of climate change. We probably degrade the world’s democracies so that they fall into some sort of bizarre autocratic dysfunction. We probably ruin the global economy. Uh, we probably, um, don’t survive. You know, I… I really do view it as existential.

[helicopter blades whirring]

[Tristan] Is this the last generation of people that are gonna know what it was like before this illusion took place? Like, how do you wake up from the matrix when you don’t know you’re in the matrix?

[ominous instrumental music playing]

“Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment…”
—Buckminster Fuller

[Tristan] A lot of what we’re saying sounds like it’s just this… one-sided doom and gloom. Like, “Oh, my God, technology’s just ruining the world and it’s ruining kids,” and it’s like… “No.” [chuckles] It’s confusing because it’s simultaneous utopia… and dystopia. Like, I could hit a button on my phone, and a car shows up in 30 seconds, and I can go exactly where I need to go. That is magic. That’s amazing.

[Justin] When we were making the like button, our entire motivation was, “Can we spread positivity and love in the world?” The idea that, fast-forward to today, and teens would be getting depressed when they don’t have enough likes, or it could be leading to political polarization was nowhere on our radar.

[Joe] I don’t think these guys set out to be evil. It’s just the business model that has a problem.

[Alex Roetter] You could shut down the service and destroy whatever it is– $20 billion of shareholder value– and get sued and… But you can’t, in practice, put the genie back in the bottle. You can make some tweaks, but at the end of the day, you’ve gotta grow revenue and usage, quarter over quarter. It’s… The bigger it gets, the harder it is for anyone to change.

[Tristan] What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, and shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else.

[Sandy] I think we need to accept that it’s okay for companies to be focused on making money. What’s not okay is when there’s no regulation, no rules, and no competition, and the companies are acting as sort of de facto governments. And then they’re saying, “Well, we can regulate ourselves.” I mean, that’s just a lie. That’s just ridiculous.

[Jaron] Financial incentives kind of run the world, so any solution to this problem has to realign the financial incentives.

[Joe] There’s no fiscal reason for these companies to change. And that is why I think we need regulation.

[Sandy] The phone company has tons of sensitive data about you, and we have a lot of laws that make sure they don’t do the wrong things. We have almost no laws around digital privacy, for example.

[Joe] We could tax data collection and processing the same way that you, for example, pay your water bill by monitoring the amount of water that you use. You tax these companies on the data assets that they have. It gives them a fiscal reason to not acquire every piece of data on the planet.

[Roger] The law runs way behind on these things, but what I know is the current situation exists not for the protection of users, but for the protection of the rights and privileges of these gigantic, incredibly wealthy companies. Are we always gonna defer to the richest, most powerful people? Or are we ever gonna say, “You know, there are times when there is a national interest. There are times when the interests of people, of users, is actually more important than the profits of somebody who’s already a billionaire”?

[Shoshana] These markets undermine democracy, and they undermine freedom, and they should be outlawed. This is not a radical proposal. There are other markets that we outlaw. We outlaw markets in human organs. We outlaw markets in human slaves. Because they have inevitable destructive consequences.

[Justin] We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they’re going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it’s going to leave a worse world for future generations. This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What’s frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place is to see that now we’re the tree, we’re the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so, we’re seeing the results of that. We’re seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.

[static crackles]

[crowd cheering]

[Steve Jobs] What a computer is to me, is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with. And it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.

[Aza] The idea of humane technology, that’s where Silicon Valley got its start. And we’ve lost sight of it because it became the cool thing to do, as opposed to the right thing to do.

[Bailey Richardson] The Internet was, like, a weird, wacky place. It was experimental. Creative things happened on the Internet,and certainly, they do still, but, like, it just feels like this, like, giant mall. [chuckles] You know, it’s just like, “God, there’s gotta be… there’s gotta be more to it than that.”

[man typing]

[Bailey] I guess I’m just an optimist. ‘Cause I think we can change what social media looks like and means.

[Justin] The way the technology works is not a law of physics. It is not set in stone. These are choices that human beings like myself have been making. And human beings can change those technologies.

[Tristan] And the question now is whether or not we’re willing to admit that those bad outcomes are coming directly as a product of our work. It’s that we built these things, and we have a responsibility to change it.

[static crackling]

[Tristan] The attention extraction model is not how we want to treat human beings.

[distorted] Is it just me or…

[distorted] Poor sucker.

[Tristan] The fabric of a healthy society depends on us getting off this corrosive business model.

[console beeps]

[gentle instrumental music playing]

[console whirs, grows quiet]

[Tristan] We can demand that these products be designed humanely. We can demand to not be treated as an extractable resource. The intention could be: “How do we make the world better?”

[Jaron] Throughout history, every single time something’s gotten better, it’s because somebody has come along to say, “This is stupid. We can do better.” [laughs] Like, it’s the critics that drive improvement. It’s the critics who are the true optimists.

[AI] [sighs] Hello.

[Tristan] [sighs] Um… I mean, it seems kind of crazy, right? It’s like the fundamental way that this stuff is designed… isn’t going in a good direction. [chuckles] Like, the entire thing. So, it sounds crazy to say we need to change all that, but that’s what we need to do.

[interviewer] Think we’re gonna get there?

[Tristan] We have to.

[tense instrumental music playing]

[interviewer] Um, it seems like you’re very optimistic.

[Justin] Is that how I sound?

[crew laughs]

[interviewer] Yeah, I mean…

[Justin] I can’t believe you keep saying that, because I’m like, “Really? I feel like we’re headed toward dystopia. I feel like we’re on the fast track to dystopia, and it’s gonna take a miracle to get us out of it.” And that miracle is, of course, collective will.

[Anna] I am optimistic that we’re going to figure it out, but I think it’s gonna take a long time. Because not everybody recognizes that this is a problem.

[Bailey] I think one of the big failures in technology today is a real failure of leadership, of, like, people coming out and having these open conversations about things that… not just what went well, but what isn’t perfect so that someone can come in and build something new.

[Tristan] At the end of the day, you know, this machine isn’t gonna turn around until there’s massive public pressure.

[Justin] By having these conversations and… and voicing your opinion, in some cases through these very technologies, we can start to change the tide. We can start to change the conversation.

[Jaron] It might sound strange, but it’s my world. It’s my community. I don’t hate them. I don’t wanna do any harm to Google or Facebook. I just want to reform them so they don’t destroy the world. You know?

[Justin] I’ve uninstalled a ton of apps from my phone that I felt were just wasting my time. All the social media apps, all the news apps, and I’ve turned off notifications on anything that was vibrating my leg with information that wasn’t timely and important to me right now. It’s for the same reason I don’t keep cookies in my pocket.

[Sandy] Reduce the number of notifications you get.

[Aza] Turn off notifications.

[Tristan] Turning off all notifications.

[Guillaume] I’m not using Google anymore, I’m using Qwant, which doesn’t store your search history.

[Jaron] Never accept a video recommended to you on YouTube. Always choose. That’s another way to fight.

[Guillaume] There are tons of Chrome extensions that remove recommendations.

[interviewer] You’re recommending something to undo what you made.

[Guillaume] [laughing] Yep.

[Renee] Before you share, fact-check, consider the source, do that extra Google. If it seems like it’s something designed to really push your emotional buttons, like, it probably is.

[Justin] Essentially, you vote with your clicks. If you click on clickbait, you’re creating a financial incentive that perpetuates this existing system.

[Cathy] Make sure that you get lots of different kinds of information in your own life. I follow people on Twitter that I disagree with because I want to be exposed to different points of view.

[Tristan] Notice that many people in the tech industry don’t give these devices to their own children.

[Alex] My kids don’t use social media at all.

[interviewer] Is that a rule, or is that a…

[Alex] That’s a rule.

[Tim] We are zealots about it. We’re… We’re crazy. And we don’t let our kids have really any screen time.

[Jonathan Haidt] I’ve worked out what I think are three simple rules, um, that make life a lot easier for families and that are justified by the research. So, the first rule is all devices out of the bedroom at a fixed time every night. Whatever the time is, half an hour before bedtime, all devices out. The second rule is no social media until high school. Personally, I think the age should be 16. Middle school’s hard enough. Keep it out until high school. And the third rule is work out a time budget with your kid. And if you talk with them and say, “Well, how many hours a day do you wanna spend on your device? What do you think is a good amount?” they’ll often say something pretty reasonable.

[jaron] Well, look, I know perfectly well that I’m not gonna get everybody to delete their social media accounts, but I think I can get a few. And just getting a few people to delete their accounts matters a lot, and the reason why is that that creates the space for a conversation because I want there to be enough people out in the society who are free of the manipulation engines to have a societal conversation that isn’t bounded by the manipulation engines. So, do it! Get out of the system. Yeah, delete. Get off the stupid stuff. The world’s beautiful. Look. Look, it’s great out there. [laughs]

[birds singing]

[children playing and shouting]

History of Health Misinformation

A great discussion on the History of Health Misinformation can be found at “Coronavirus and the Black Death: spread of misinformation and xenophobia shows we haven’t learned from our past.”

The history of Health Misinformation has more recent evidence in the form of the misinformation about Aids, in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s – “HIV misinformation” – from Coronavirus: Fake news is spreading fast.

Health Misinformation creates an opportunity to make any crisis worse and increases the chances of individual risky behavior.

Another example. It was reported that a province in Iran found that more people had died from drinking industrial-strength alcohol, based on a false claim that it could protect you from Covid-19, than from the virus itself.

A report by YouGov and the Economist in March 2020 found 13% of Americans believed the Covid-19 crisis was a hoax, for example, while a whopping 49% believed the epidemic might be man-made. And while you might hope that greater brainpower or education would help us to tell fact from fiction, it is easy to find examples of many educated people falling for this false information.

Another example of Health Misinformation comes from a Kelly Brogan, a prominent Covid-19 conspiracy theorist.

Here are some examples of World Leaders spreading inaccurate information about the risk of the outbreak and promoting unproven remedies that may do more harm than good.

The Misinformation Effect

 

How you can protect yourself from misinformation