Lex Fridman: preference

Transcript context

…I hope so. Yeah, and I think so in the main. Obviously, you can always find debate that went horribly wrong because there’s humans involved. But speaking of those humans, I would venture to guess, I don’t know the data, maybe you can let me know, but the personal political leaning of the group of people who had a Wikipedia probably leans left, I would guess. To me, the question there is, I mean the same is true for Silicon Valley, the task for Silicon Valley is to create platforms that are not politically biased even though there is a bias for the engineers who create it. I believe it’s possible to do that. There’s conspiracy theories that it somehow is impossible, and there’s this whole conspiracy where the left is controlling it, and so on. I think engineers, for the most part, want to create platforms that are open and unbiased that create all kinds of perspective because that’s super exciting to have all kinds of perspectives battle it out, but still is there a degree to which the personal political bias of the editors might seep in in silly ways and in big ways? Silly ways could be, I think, hopefully I’m correct in saying this, but the right will call it the Democrat Party and the left will call it the Democratic Party, right? It always hits my ear weird. Are we children here? We’re literally taking words and just jabbing at each other. Yeah, I could capitalize a thing in a certain way, or I can just take a word and mess with them. That’s a small way of how you use words, but you can also have a bigger way about beliefs, about various perspectives on political events, on Hunter Biden’s laptop, on how big of a story that is or not, how big the censorship of that story is or not, and then there’s these camps to take very strong points and they construct big narratives around that. It’s a very sizable percent of the population believes the two narratives that compete with each other. Yeah. It’s really interesting and it’s hard to judge the sweep of history within your own lifetime, but it feels like it’s gotten much worse, that this idea of two parallel universes where people can agree on certain basic facts feels worse than it used to be. I’m not sure if that’s true or if it just feels that way, but I’m not sure what the causes are. I think I would lay a lot of the blame in recent years on social media algorithms, which reward clickbait headlines, which reward tweets that go viral, and they go viral because they’re cute and clever. My most successful tweet ever by a fairly wide margin, some reporter tweeted at Elon Musk because he was complaining about Wikipedia or something, “You should buy Wikipedia,” and I just wrote, “Bot for sale,” and 90 zillion retweets, and people liked it, and it was all very good, but I’m like, “You know what? It’s cute line and it’s a good mic drop,” and all that, and I was pleased with myself. I’m like, “It’s not really a discourse.” It’s not really what I like to do, but it’s what social media really rewards, which is kind of a let’s you and him have a fight, and that’s more interesting. It’s funny because at the time, I was texting with Elon who’s very pleasant to me, and all of that.…

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