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DIRESTA
July 4, 2021
Renée DiResta is someone who's been working for
years now on problems of great interest to me, and I'm
only now starting to check out what she's been saying.
Clearly I'm not working hard enough.
But then, my personal reaction to both her statments
and herself I would have to say is Not Good.
She's the very epitome of a certain kind of well-connected
"privilege"-- e.g. when she needs an impressive-sounding
affiliation to use when talking to Congress, she just
phones someone and gets handed one.
My reaction to all this is so bad it makes it difficult to
judge what she's saying in a neutral way-- there I am
occasionally trying to influence the zeitgeist chattering
in obscure corners of reddit, and there she is getting
handed gigs with the Obama White House.
But even if she's more of a sign-of-the-times
than a source of illumination for me, I might
find something worthwhile in the blizzard of
names she drops, so let's go...
(Hm... she went to Stony Brook
and is now associated with Stanford--
maybe it's no wonder I've got a bad
reaction...)
I started with her Long Now talk from 2018:
https://theinterval.org/salon-talks/02018/apr/10/disinformation-technology-online-propaganda-campaigns-diresta
This is an incredibly fast spoken torrent of words
where the LongNow questioner-- not Stewart Brand,
this time-- had to get her to back up and explain
the one graph of data she presented, e.g. what
*does* the size of the dots mean?
And I'm not at all sure she explained it correctly--
how could the size of the dots possibly represent
"connectedness" when you can see that many of the
bigger ones are visually isolated from the lines that
are supposed to represent communications? It seems
more likely to me that the size of the dots represent
frequency of posting and the edges represent some sort
of acknowledgement of influence -- a reply or retweet
or something.
Getting something like a coherent position from her
talk requires interpreting her tone and rearranging It might be better
the bits of reasoning she presents into a structure. to think about possible
arguments you could
If I wanted to be snarky about it: she's not just an make with this material,
expert in Social Media she's someone who learned to and not worry so much
think from it. about representing her
correctly.
She strikes me as something of a digital age Karen:
she's deeply convinced that she's the normal one and
obviously the powers that be just need to be reminded
that they're supposed to listen to her and do things
she likes.
She has a habit of dashing off remarks like this:
"As late as 2015-- the EFF was posting
essays about how the government had no
business interfering with social media.
Or talking about how one man's terrorist
is another man's freedom fighter." She was enlisted
by Obama to study
And so, she dismisses the EFF's position with a Isis propaganda
casual "obviously we all know better than these efforts.
fools" tone.
Myself, I would think it should be obvious
that government control of channels of
information could be a cure worse than the
disease, and "terrorist" remains a hot button Just looking at established
label without clear definition. usage, a terrorist is
someone who kills civilians
without spending a lot of
money on it. If you've got
expensive weapons, nothing
you do with them will be
labeled terrorism.
What about the idea that good speech is the
best antidote to bad speech? Oh, obviously (We don't object to
that doesn't work-- it's dismissed without even murderers, we object
a handwave (she talks too fast to use her to cut-rate ones.)
hands). Huge swaithes of hard won
enlightenment wisdom are discarded without a
qualm. We know better now, because internet.
Does her own speech count as
She's dismissive of training good speech? Why does she do
individuals to resist cognitive it, who is she talking to?
bias, and claims there are Studies
That Show this only works for a Implicit, I think is the idea that
minute, then they go back to their she's a member of an elite that can
"human" biases. reason, who must control-- excuse me,
*nudge*-- the mere hoi polloi.
To be fair to here, Daniel
Kahneman himself had that Cynically, you might guess she
feeling-- but we do have figures she's a good con-artist who
examples of de-biasing can talk her way to power by
training that's actually flattering us as insiders like her.
quite effective.
SUPERFORECASTING
She repeatedly rejects the idea that you can
expect people to read critically-- what they're
supposed to go around being suspicious of
everything they see? (Instead, they're supposed
to uncritically believe what DiResta thinks they
should? Or more precisely, only be exposed to the
material DiResta thinks they should be.)
Myself, I think that this attitude is a
fundamental rejection of the idea of Democracy.
If DiResta doesn't see this, or won't say this,
that in itself is somewhat interesting...
there's a short term focus there: "what kind
of hacks can we get 'em to go for *this* year?".
After rejecting the idea of teaching critical
thinking to the masses, she argues that it seems
more "cost effective" to her for the big companies
handle it for us-- and they're going to be
pressured into doing this by government regulation.
She does mention in passing the idea
that ad-supported forums are necessarily She makes the point that there
"toxic", and mentions the possibility of are problems with what to
a subscription-based social media. charge in a global system-- we
might spend $7/month in the
West, but there are other
places where that's a days
wages.
She makes no mention of the
non-profit donations model or
of government funding.
Rather than try to think of ways to build robust
systems, she's enamored of short term hacks--
her idea back in April of 2018 was that the
Congressional Hearings into social media like
facebook were going to conclude with the DIRESTA_VS_THE_FAANG
government Doing Something to regulate the socmeds
that would be effective in suppressing things
like the Russian interference in the 2016 election.
See, free speech and critical thinking, that
obviously doesn't work, so instead of that
unrealistic claptrap, she's expecting the US
Congress to Do The Right Thing. And then
Facebook is going to respond in good faith.
The Right Thing, by the way, is going to
stop short of censorship (or at least,
anything that might get called censorship):
you can say anything you want on the At this point, I bet
internet (if if makes you feel better) but you're thinking that
The Algorithms that decide which posts to I must be misrepresenting
push to people will be fixed-up to hide DiResta-- my sarcasm
things from you that The Algorithms have must be raging out-of-
been told are pernicious. control, eh? It can't
possibly be that anyone's
Replacing one gameable, thinking could be this
corruptible system with shallow, could it?
another.
She makes remarks like
As they say, "how'd "not everything that's
that work for you?" posted needs to be
featured".
The idea is that it's
better to merely control
what's "featured", not
what's being said.
You still have free
speech!
As long as you stay in
that nice "free speech
zone" over *there*.
She recites this slogan a few
times and never explains what
it could possibly mean:
"It's not about truth
it's about integrity" (I gather she dropped
this slogan later.)
From context, it appears that by "integrity"
she means authentic and sincere.
Perhaps: from correctly identified
sources with verified identities. The need for verified
identities is something
I think the idea is she acknowledges the I come back to often.
problem with having a Ministry of Truth I wouldn't even object
that decides what's fake and what's not, to laws that require them.
and she's looking for an end-run around
that problem.
So she's hoping that she and her cohort
of smart millenials will be able to
identify bad sources of information and
instruct the Masters of the Algorithms
to nudge their visibility downwards.
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