I think the basic problem of social media is that if you have a lot of data about user behavior, you can train AI systems which goodheart on some metric to get the user to do stuff they don’t self-endorse.
The questions, in my opinion, are therefore
How do you prevent the companies from getting that information
How do you prevent the companies from using that information
How do you prevent the companies from goodhearting on user behavior
Social media is also useful, and we’d like to preserve that aspect. Here is a list of things we’d like to preserve about social media
Ease of information and content discovery
Networking
Maintaining network connections
Therefore solutions like “ban companies from storing user information” seem a priori suboptimal, as they make content discovery harder.
I don’t think it’s correct to describe the optimization social media companies do as Goodharting. They’re optimizing for exactly what they want: money. It’s not that they want what’s truly best for their users and are mistaking engagement for that—I think it’s pretty clear at this point social media companies don’t care at all about their users’ wellbeing.
I think the basic problem of social media is that if you have a lot of data about user behavior, you can train AI systems which goodheart on some metric to get the user to do stuff they don’t self-endorse.
The questions, in my opinion, are therefore
How do you prevent the companies from getting that information
How do you prevent the companies from using that information
How do you prevent the companies from goodhearting on user behavior
Social media is also useful, and we’d like to preserve that aspect. Here is a list of things we’d like to preserve about social media
Ease of information and content discovery
Networking
Maintaining network connections
Therefore solutions like “ban companies from storing user information” seem a priori suboptimal, as they make content discovery harder.
I don’t think it’s correct to describe the optimization social media companies do as Goodharting. They’re optimizing for exactly what they want: money. It’s not that they want what’s truly best for their users and are mistaking engagement for that—I think it’s pretty clear at this point social media companies don’t care at all about their users’ wellbeing.