- Sep 4, 2005
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I think we see a fair amount of "selective thoughtfulness" in the current political climate.If people preferred thoughtfulness about difficult issues over outrage and indignation, the algorithms would be steering them toward more of the former.
Selective thoughtfulness meaning - when trying to refute or "dunk on" an assertion/position of the other side, people are willing to go way in-depth on that and delve into charts/data/graphs/studies, but when it comes to something that affirms their own preference, they'll gleefully accept bumper sticker premise and/or abstract platitudes.
So, I don't think it's so much that people necessarily prefer outrage over thoughtfulness, it's that superficiality (which tends to manifest as outrage) becomes the default when someone from the other team's thoughtfulness leads them to a different conclusion than their own.
...and it's always easier to construct an algorithm that quickly jumps to the default "default" than it is around a scenario in which it's pressed to make a non-default decision.
In the programming world, if there were a complex problem we're trying to solve, if a person wrote two "if" statements and then sent it to a default path if it didn't neatly meet either criteria, we'd call that lazy programming. If pressed for a solution that has to make the best decision and "defaulting isn't an option, you gotta keep going till you get the best answer", that takes more time and effort.
Given that social media companies exist on ad revenue, I can fully believe that they're taking some shortcuts in that regard.
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