Rationalizing

It's not hard to find someone who will pontificate against the tendency of social media and news platforms to present audiences with "rage bait" and other fare that's designed to drive interaction by making people angry. What I'm much more curious about is why people are so willing to take the bait, and/or reward other people for doing so.

I suspect that part of the reason why it's so much easier to find people willing to talk about the former than the latter is that railing against, say, Jubilee on YouTube for posting videos designed to drive thousands of hot-takes is a form of rage bait, and perhaps virtue signalling, in and of itself. It allows people to present themselves as righteous, and an audience can feel righteous along with them, feeling themselves superior to both the purveyors of the content, and the people who rush to engage with it.

Understanding why it comes across as so compelling and satisfying to react to (even if one hasn't bothered to fully understand, or even watch, read or listen to it) is unlikely to simply present other people as stupid or uneducated. Sure, there's still likely to be the ability for an audience to hold themselves as above whomever is being spoken of, and to declare themselves immune from such open manipulation.

But I also think that the truth of the matter, the reasons why it's so easy to spark people to outrage, especially by simply hinting that certain people are not simply Other, but bad people for that, is that it's dry, and technical. And so it doesn't offer a quick dopamine hit, or a fix of Meaning. Instead, it's simply a lesson in human psychology, something that people don't find all that interesting, judging by how little it appears in feeds or podcasts.

Small Problems

I understand the push for companies to automate as much as possible; they're looking to keep their costs as low as possible, and having people do things can be expensive. Sure, eventually companies run the risk that automation is in such widespread use that their customers find themselves out of work (or stuck with poorly-paying service jobs) and can't afford their products and services, but that's a problem for future CEOs.

The problem that high degrees of automation bring now is that it's not infallible, and if there are few to no people around, there's no-one there to catch mistakes, like this one:

I'm not sure how this was classified as a Technology story; there are any number of places along the way where that could have happened. And, because Age of Sigmar is a niche within the greater niche of Warhammer tabletop fantasy wargaming, it's unlikely that most of the people who scrolled past this set of stories realized that it was misplaced.

But these are the sorts of admittedly minor errors that erode people's trust in technology; because if there are problems in areas that one knows something about, might there not also be errors in areas where one doesn't have firsthand knowledge? In this sense, it's similar to "Knoll's Law of Media Accuracy," which can be understood to be a reason behind a general distrust of media stories.

The answer from Google News would likely be that their classifications of stories are accurate enough... it's not like the categorizations are done at random, or anything. And that's likely true. But there's still a problem with not knowing if novel information is accurate that prevents these sorts of automated systems from being trusted sources in the way they were intended to be. 

Another Lap

It's another new year. I think I've learned my lesson with resolutions. My goal of being more politically engaged back in 2004 has resulted in a steady stream of fundraising e-mails from all around the country that has yet to dry up, and my gastrointestinal tract still hasn't forgiven me for deciding to go vegetarian for all of January 2019. Other years haven't been much better in that regard.

But still, it's nice to have goals, and so I do want to have one for this year. So maybe I'll just go with something simple, and put some effort into being more helpful. Helping people out with things, even minor ones, can make my whole day, and it's not like I'm attempting to make the whole world, or even the whole of Washington State, a better place.

It's easy to be negative; after all, I've become quite good at it, for all that it's gotten me. So why not instead do a little work to spread some positivity? The world is still likely to suck for a lot of people, but I don't have to be an active agent of that. Besides, as often as I say that I should be the change I want to see in the world, I may as well put my money where my mouth is.

The other thing that I'd like to do this year is try my hand at podcasting. That's a much longer shot, I have no real idea on what all that entails, but it can't hurt to learn, right? (I feel like I've just tempted fate with that last bit... we'll see how hard it bites me.)