Technology

Thanks!

I feel enlightened now that you called out the self-reinforcing nature of the algorithms. It makes sense that an RL agent solving the bandits problem would create its own bubbles out of laziness.

You're totally right that it's like a multi-armed bandit problem, but maybe with so many possibilities that searching is prohibitively expensive, since the space of options to search is much bigger than the rate that humans can consume content. In other ways, though, there's a dissimilarity because the agent's reward depends on its past choices (people watch more of what they're recommended). It would be really interesting to know if anyone has modeled a multi-armed bandit problem with this kind of self-dependency. I bet that, in that case, the exploration behavior is pretty chaotic. @abucci@buc.ci this seems like something you might just know off the top of your head!

Maybe we can take advantage of that laziness to incept critical thinking back into social media, or at least have it eat itself.

If you have any ideas for how to turn social media against itself, I'd love to hear them. I worked on this post unusually long for a lot of reasons, but one of them was trying to think of a counter strategy. I came up with nothing though!