Insofar technology can 'fix' social issues it must do so by facilitating social solutions. (Of course, this is only what I think). We are to become hypercyberhuman — but still human in the end. There must be human relationships and society; trust and mechanisms to build and maintain trust.

I don't know about profit, but I think that a lot has to do with the nature and scale of the medium. In a normal healthy society, we police ourselves and each other through our relationships. Online, there are far too many people and ephemeral out-of-network connections happening in 'one place' (like a 100,000-person thread) for real relationships and connections to form, so that precludes normal social policing behaviors online.

At some point, people need to take responsibility as digital citizens and not wait for some faceless corporate or governmental agency to make the internet wonderful. I think that's a good thing about Tildes: it's small enough for digital relationships to form, people care about and respect those digital relationships, and altogether people want a certain kind of culture here. So we as users take responsibility for setting boundaries with each other and democratically shaping the culture.

Suggested reading.

Hello Avatar by Beth Coleman. Cool short book going over how people can inhabit online social spaces.

The Social Machines: Designs for Living Online by Judith Donath. A must read for anyone intellectually curious about social technology and yet is insufficiently stimulated by New York Times cyber-pop-psych books.

Oooh my, let me dust off my old... EVERNOTE notes from 2015, haha. Back then, I had noted passages and sentences that leapt out at me. She had a massive influence and impact on me. Many of my ideas and perspectives have been colored by hers.

(There are a bunch of spelling errors and missing words because I probably took these notes very quickly at the time and didn't mean for them to be read by anyone beside me.)

p. 10. "To achieve a future in which online interaction breaks down cultural barriers and solves big problems, we need to design interfaces that encourage people to take responsibility for their words and to engage with each other more cooperatively—far too many of today's discussions descend into vicious acrimony."

p. 12. "[Grinter and Palen 2002] found that [teen users] were quite sensitive to how their presence and a sense registered to others, learned each other's activity patterns, and diligently provided reasons for moments of unavailability."

p. 13. Winston Churchill: "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."

p. 42-3. “Interfaces set the scene for online sociability. The features of a social space not only facilitate discussion, they also set the tone for it, affecting how the users perceive each other and conveying cues about who to act. Representations of people, even if abstract, should portray the individual vividly and evocatively."

p. 44. “But he that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose” Quote by Anne Brontë in her poem.

p. 47. “One can… make… bizarrely acting screen buttons… viewers perceive these to be strange because they have preëxisting expectations of normal behavior that are subverted in this situation. Cognitive metaphors can be (mis)used poetically."

p. 62. "Motion in the interface can create the impression of vitality: living things are never completely still."

p. 63. "Aesthetic judgment is a combination of cultural taste and personal response. It is a subjective assessment, drawing from nth our sensory responses and our learned interpretations."

p. 71. "This is a vivid example of the power of a metaphor: the metaphor we use to think about something can change how we interpret it, act toward t, and judge how others behave toward similar things."

p. 72. "An affordance is different form a function. because he latter implies an intended purpose. A fallen tree and a chair both afford sitting (for people), but it is the intended function only of the chair."

p. 112. "Such games and the promise they held f a world United through continuous links of acquaintance resonated with many people. In Life and Death of Great American Cities, pioneering urbanist Jane Hacobs recounts playing a similar game with her sister."

p. 113. Touches on issue of user agency. "Look but cannot touch..."

p. 124. "For our... society, we can argue that the ideal network is... a super-network: large and densely connected, yet consisting of heterogeneous (and thus relatively weak) links."

p. 129. "It has been clear for a while that our need for strong ties is diminishing. For a growing number of people, the market, not family and friends, provides the means of obtaining shelter, food, childcare, and the like.

p. 161. "Licklider was one of he original cyber-utopian a...But he also cautioned that universal access was essential: "For the society, the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will 'to be online' be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of 'intelligence amplification,' the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity.""

p. 185. “For the designer of tomorrow communities (and thus of their boundaries), the history of Usenet vividly illustrates how boundaries evolve in response to changing circumstances, and what happens when the fail."

p. 187. "... a dry text interface does not provide the feel of a vibrant society."

p. 228. "Individual identity is fundamental for forming relationships: if you are my friend or lover, you are not replaceable with a similar other, no matter how strong the resemblance."

p. 235. Dramaturgical model of society: "daily life is a performance in which people attempt to create a desirable impression, within the constraints of their role in a particular context and their social (acting) abilities."

p. 239. "Our subjects had experienced a lifetime in which ethnicity (including race) was an ecologically valid predictor of people's social alliances and coalition all affiliations. Yet less than 4 min of exposure to an alternative social world in which race was irrelevant to the prevailing system of alliance caused a dramatic decrease in the extent to which they categorized others by race. This implies that coalition, and hence race, is a volatile, dynamically updated cognitive variable, easily overwritten by new circumstances. If the same processes govern categorization outside the laboratory, then the prospects for reducing or even eliminating the widespread tendency to categorize persons by race may be very good indeed. (Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides 2001, 15391)"

p. 244. "The design goal is to create a space in which the most obvious and salient properties that we see of the other are the qualities around which we want society to structure itself."

p. 268. "In one experiment, Bailensen and colleagues demonstrated that people are more trusting of others who resemble themselves. They took pictures of political candidates and, unknown to the subject, morphed the subject's face with the candidate's, subtly enough that few detected it. The subjects showed a measurable preference for candidates when they w

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with skepticism or critique - the issue is with lazy, default skepticism or critique. If someone posts an article about a new drug, and you read the article, and write a post which elaborates and explains why you think said drug is bunk, that’s fine. A thoughtless, throwaway cynical remark is the issue.

Consider the following pattern as an example of a lazy, dismissive critique.

1. Someone posts an article suggesting X causes Y.

2. Another user asks: but did the researchers consider possible confounder A?

The user's objection might appear reasonable, but the problem is that the answer is almost definitely yes and explored in the study. If someone can think of an objection in the twenty seconds it takes to read a headline, then the researchers certainly would've thought of it in the dozens/hundreds of hours they spent conducting their study.

Sometimes our reasoned response should be "why is this sparkly new med / battery tech / etc different from all the non functioning examples that we've seen?"

This is a great question to ask! But it's exactly that -- a question. If an article suggests sparkly widget A can solve some particular problem, but you can recall another article in which sparkly widget B was proposed to solve the same problem, it's fair to ask how the two solutions differ. But if you don't know, it's much better to ask How are these technologies different? than simple state I don't see how these two pieces of technology differ. In the former case, you're inviting someone to explain the new development; in the latter, you're implying the new technology has no utility.

Certainly. And there’s no shortage of informed commenters pointing out each of these problems on nearly all of these posts. The breathless hopium that cynics describe the rest of us falling for is resoundingly crushed each time. Don’t worry. There are absolutely failings, as you say, in science publishing and science journalism and the intersection of capitalism and research.

But that isn’t what I’m saying. I’m talking about the first sixty comments on any new advance being a low-effort variation on “Someone tell me why this won’t work in 5… 4… 3…”

It doesn’t add to the conversation. It’s just social media clutter. My idea with r/techtracker was to solve this problem and the one you describe, instead of just complaining more.

Your post is well intended, but that isn't really what happened. That's the way the media have explained it.

One drug was pushed through by the FDA, and the reasons did not make sense or demonstrate that it would actually be therapeutic. Since then, two similar drugs have passed clinical trials with actually therapeutic results (as in, quality-of-life-extending). There is a whole new set of problems to address, particularly that they are wildly expensive. They won't help anyone but the very wealthy at first.

Another issue is that one scientist almost certainly did fabricate/reuse results that underpinned most research on a particular amyloid type. It only invalidated that niche area of study, not broader amyloid research.

Finally, researchers have known for decades that amyloid is not the only culprit and may not even be the main culprit. People didn't shout them down. Major funding has gone to many, many hypothesis-driven studies that would make no sense if the amyloid-is-the-whole-problem were assumed to be true.

This isn't an attack, just a chance to clarify some points that have made it into the popular, educated zeitgeist but are not true in the way that people think they are.