The Internet emerged by connecting communities of researchers, but as Internet grew, antisocial behaviors were not adequately discouraged.
When I [Aleks] coauthored several internet standards (PNG, JPEG, MNG), I was guided by the vision of connecting humanity. . . .
The Internet was originally designed to connect a few academic institutions, namely universities and research labs. Academia is a community of academics, which has always been based on the openness of information. Perhaps the most important to the history of the Internet is the hacker community composed of computer scientists, administrators, and programmers, most of whom are not affiliated with academia directly but are employed by companies and institutions. Whenever there is a community, its members are much more likely to volunteer time and resources to it. It was these communities that created websites, wrote the software, and started providing internet services.
“Whenever there is a community, its members are much more likely to volunteer time and resources to it” . . . so true!
As I wrote a few years ago, Create your own community (if you need to).
But it’s not just about community; you also have to pay the bills.
Aleks continues:
The skills of the hacker community are highly sought after and compensated well, and hackers can afford to dedicate their spare time to the community. Society is funding universities and institutes who employ scholars. Within the academic community, the compensation is through citation, while plagiarism or falsification can destroy someone’s career. Institutions and communities have enforced these rules both formally and informally through members’ desire to maintain and grow their standing within the community.
Lots to chew on here. First, yeah, I have skills that allow me to be compensated well, and I can afford to dedicate my spare time to the community. This is not new: back in the early 1990s I wrote Bayesian Data Analysis in what was essentially my spare time, indeed my department chair advised me not to do it at all—master of short-term thinking that he was. As Aleks points out, was a time when a large proportion of internet users had this external compensation.
The other interesting thing about the above quote is that academics and tech workers have traditionally had an incentive to tell the truth, at least on things that can be checked. Repeatedly getting things wrong would be bad for your reputation. Or, to put it another way, you could be a successful academic and repeatedly get things wrong, but then you’d be crossing the John Yoo line and becoming a partisan hack. (Just to be clear, I’m not saying that being partisan makes you a hack. There are lots of scholars who express strong partisan views but with intellectual integrity. The “hack” part comes from getting stuff wrong, trying to pass yourself off as an expert on topics you know nothing about, ultimately being willing to say just about anything if you think it will make the people on your side happy.)
Aleks continues:
The values of academic community can be sustained within universities, but are not adequate outside of it. When businesses and general public joined the internet, many of the internet technologies and services were overwhelmed with the newcomers who didn’t share their values and were not members of the community. . . . False information is distracting people with untrue or irrelevant conspiracy theories, ineffective medical treatments, while facilitating terrorist organization recruiting and propaganda.
I’ve not looked at data on all these things, but, yeah, from what I’ve read, all that does seem to be happening.
Aleks then moves on to internet media:
It was the volunteers, webmasters, who created the first websites. Websites made information easily accessible. The website was property and a brand, vouching for the reputation of the content and data there. Users bookmarked those websites they liked so that they could revisit them later. . . .
In those days, I kept current about the developments in the field by following newsgroups and regularly visiting key websites that curated the information on a particular topic. Google entered the picture by downloading all of Internet and indexing it. . . . the perceived credit for finding information went to Google and no longer to the creators of the websites.
He continues:
After a few years of maintaining my website, I was no longer receiving much appreciation for this work, so I have given up maintaining the pages on my website and curating links. This must have happened around 2005. An increasing number of Wikipedia editors are giving up their unpaid efforts to maintain quality in the fight with vandalism or content spam. . . . On the other hand, marketers continue to have an incentive to put information online that would lead to sales. As a result of depriving contributors to the open web with brand and credit, search results on Google tend to be of worse quality.
And then:
When Internet search was gradually taking over from websites, there was one area where a writer’s personal property and personal brand were still protected: blogging. . . . The community connected through the comments on blog posts. The bloggers were known and personally subscribed to.
That’s where I came in!
Aleks continues:
Alas, whenever there’s an unprotected resource online, some startup will move in and harvest it. Social media tools simplified link sharing. Thus, an “influencer” could easily post a link to an article written by someone else within their own social media feed. The conversation was removed from the blog post and instead developed in the influencer’s feed. As a result, carefully written articles have become a mere resource for influencers. As a result, the number of new blogs has been falling.
Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook reduced barriers to entry by making so easy to refer to others’ content . . .
I hadn’t thought about this, but, yeah, good point.
As a producer of “content”—for example, what I’m typing right now—I don’t really care if people come to this blog from Google, Facebook, Twitter, an RSS feed, or a link on their browser. (There have been cases where someone’s stripped the material from here and put it on their own site without acknowledging the source, but that’s happened only rarely.) Any of those legitimate ways of reaching this content is fine with me: my goal is just to get it out there, to inform people and to influence discussion. I already have a well-paying job, so I don’t need to make money off the blogging. If it did make money, that would be fine—I could use it to support a postdoc—but I don’t really have a clear sense of how that would happen, so I haven’t ever looked into it seriously.
The thing I hadn’t thought about was that, even if to me it doesn’t matter where our reader are coming, this does matter to the larger community. Back in the day, if someone wanted to link or react to something on a blog, they’d do it in their own blog or in a comment section. Now they can do it from Facebook or Twitter. The link itself is no problem, but there is a problem in that there’s less of an expectation of providing new content along with the link. Also, Facebook and Twitter are their own communities, which have their strengths but which are different than those of blogs. In particular, blogging facilitates a form of writing where you fill in all the details of your argument, where you can go on tangents if you’d like, and where you link to all relevant sources. Twitter has the advantage of immediacy, but often it seems more like community without the content, where people can go on and say what they love or hate but without the space for giving their reasons.
>The conversation was removed from the blog post and instead developed in the influencer’s feed.
But is the kind of conversation that developed in the influencer’s feed the kind of conversation that was going on (or wanted) on the blog? It wasn’t a different crowd?
If influencer hijacking killed blogging just imagine what the likes of ChatGPT are going to do to the generation of original content.
What incentive do I have to produce new content on my blog if it is merely for chatGPT to scan and regurgitate as part of its own output without even a mention of the source?!
Yes, I wonder if this will encourage some sort of pay walls. …although I guess Open AI or whoever will simply train a GPT to sign up and pay with the company credit card for any legit seeming blog. On the other hand, if your primary purpose is to get your message out, then having ChatGPT regurgitate your message is a win, right? I guess it all depends on why you’re blogging.
That’s like asking why bother about plagiarism if your goal is to get the message out…..
Back when twitter was cool, I thought that the reason that bloggers who got a twitter account usually stopped blogging within a year were that twitter was optimized for smartphones and optimized for giving that feeling “ooh, someone on the Internet has strong opinions on something I said!” Remember Vi Hart’s Internet votes: in an hour of surfing, someone can click 10 likes and boosts, or write one substantive reply to a post. So if you allow them, quick-and-easy responses drown out slow-and-thoughtful. In the 2010s many communities had to choose between becoming less substantial or creating a ‘no memes’ rule.
The early Internet was heavily weighted towards academics, students, librarians, and infovores, so as more people got online, I think it was inevitable that Internet culture became more like mainstream culture. Even the culture of journalism is not great on citing sources in a way which readers can follow! (And its notorious that some big newspapers build stories by taking someone else’s journalism or social media post, filing the serial numbers off, and publishing it as their own with no or little pointer to the inspiration). However, sites like pinterest (and now services like ChatGPT) made choices which make it hard to find the ultimate source for an image, and audio-visual clip, or a paragraph. Design choices create affordances which shape behavior.
Jakulin: “False information is distracting people with untrue or irrelevant conspiracy theories, ineffective medical treatments, while facilitating terrorist organization recruiting and propaganda.”
I got online in the 1990s, around the time that Jakulin was helping to create standards like JPEG and PNG. I note that snopes.com was founded in 1994 off a previous Usenet group, and that in the 1990s the relative who forwards you crazy or fraudulent emails was a type. Eternal September was in 1993. So if there was a time before spreading misinformation, propaganda, and scams was a common Internet activity, it was before the 1990s.
I think the issue is more about the relative size of the groups. Eternal September may have been 1993 which happens to have been my first year at Univ so I got to see before and after, but there’s no question that the character of the internet changed a lot between 1993 and 1999. The norms were different in 1993 and were not already completely different in 1994 or 1995 etc but were completely different by say 2010.
Thanks for bringing in some solid dates to what can otherwise be vague nostalgia.
I’d just like to point out that there’s a space online where the community is fighting back against coopting and creating older-style communities. Mastodon and the larger “Fediverse” (universe of sites which federate their content together via ActivityPub protocol). Other than Gelman’s blog it’s the place I go when I want to engage other smart interested people in discussions about important topics in science, information security, free software, the future of ipv6 enabled internet, etc.
Some people don’t like that it’s not a Twitter replacement, and that it’s not some kind of be-all end-all for racial harmony or whatever… but to me it satisfies an important academic function, which is it helps me find a community of people who have similar intellectual interests. So far I’ve had conversations about western music notation, statistical methodology, internet security issues, IETF standards, etc etc
I’m keeping in touch with several people who post regularly on this blog, and also can create and cultivate conversations outside the topics that Andrew selects.
The biggest confusion people have about Mastodon and other fediverse software is that it’s NOT a service, it’s a piece of software that anyone who wants to provide a service can run… So you have to find yourself a server. I’ve personally chosen mastodon.sdf.org because sdf.org is a “hacker community” from WAY back (like 1980’s dial-up community from pre modern internet). I figure they know how to keep servers online and backed up. But there’s also bayes.club and fosstodon.org and fediscience.org and scicomm.xyz and mathstodon.xyz and universeodon.com and infosec.exchange and hachyderm.io and a lot of others. Look at the terms of service and who runs the server before signing up. Your main goal is to connect to a server that is going to be there for a while and not go down due to outages or be connected to horrible neo-Nazis or whatever other things could make your experience less good.
The servers listed above are all servers taken from the list of people I follow, and seem to have been successful for them.
Also, WordPress has an ActivityPub federation plugin and it might be worthwhile to consider whether this blog should install and activate it.
The point of fediverse in theory is to enable individuals to connect together without “permission” from intermediaries like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. I think it’s working for me.
hmm… awkward first sentence… fighting back against coopting yes, and also still creating older style online communities.
A related phenomenon, another example of inherent good news/bad news aspect of these technological advances (which I guess has always been the case with technological advances?).
Along with the movement of “research” from the domain of academia to the wider world – the whole “Do your own research” movement, where “research” comprises little other than “conduct some Google searches.” In addition to potential biases introduced by Google’s algorithm, which interacts with (or maybe multiplies?) biases introduced by the “researcher’s” past search behaviors, I have to think that for all the advantage of increased access to information, there’s a degrading aspect. Is “research” as a whole worse off in balance? I doubt it. But I find the ubiquity of total crap being passed off as “reaearch” on massive platforms like Joe Rogan’s and Alex Jones’ disheartening.
Old man yells “Kids today” at cloud? Maybe.
You know, I’ve got this weird relationship with the “do your own research” stuff.
I mean, suppose a medical doctor asks on the internet “How do you know if you obtained a large enough sample for an observational study”: (like at this Reddit post)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskStatistics/comments/15lq3n4/how_do_you_know_if_you_obtained_a_large_enough/
Well, people from around here would know that **it literally doesn’t matter** how big your sample size was, an observational study has only a tenuous relationship to sample size because without random sampling there is essentially no direct relationship between sample size and any kind of measure of “accuracy” of the results. (this was literally a post by Andrew about his bathroom scale a couple days ago).
But the Reddit post is in an online community for asking statistics questions, and the answers are things like 1) the smaller your sample size the bigger the disparity needs to be to prove your findings, and 2) do a post-hoc power analysis
These are literally horrible answers, but they are *standard* types of answers within the community of scientists today.
Suppose I post over there about the flaws in NHST and Paul Meehl’s analysis from as far back as the 1960’s and how p values don’t tell you what you want to know and information about Kolmogorov Complexity and how random sampling differs from any observational study at an inherent level, and it’s easily possible to get better answers from a carefully conducted observational study with 12 people than it is from a convenience sample of 10000 depending on what’s going on in the convenience sample. This will be received approximately like a person who claims to have done their own research and have proof that the earth is flat, and UFOs are actual aliens.
And to me, that seems to be a really serious problem.
Incidentally, if you read that group, in any given week it’s quite likely that 5-6 posts from doctors, graduate students, and postdocs will be asked that are essentially “how do I fulfill this technical requirement of these particular tests to get particular p values?” or “what can I do to my data/analysis so I get a ‘significant’ results” and the answers, often from PhDs in stats, almost never look like “holy shit your whole paradigm of research has been badly polluted by terrible ideas” it’s always more like “do XYZ to fulfill these requirements” or “have you tried a coordinate transform?”
For example, here’s someone who has a bunch of different variables, and they’re really REALLY eager to hit their problem with the linear regression hammer, but no matter how they plot y vs various variables a, b, or c they can’t make it look like a line, so they don’t know what to do. “efrique” at least gives them kind of a little bit of not terrible help but it feels like asking someone if they checked the fuel gauge on their car when they say “my car won’t start”… it’s an ok first step but about 3 orders of magnitude different from a good solution.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskStatistics/comments/15luhi6/any_way_to_salvage_data_for_analysis/
It’s literally easy to find a question that just makes you want to throw up your hands and move into a hermit hovel on a mountainside in Alaska. I recognize not everyone can be an *expert* in statistics, but for someone to say “when doing data analysis… I typically use Python/Pandas…” suggests they should have a better idea of what the heck they’re doing than “I am seeking to identify correlation or relationship within the voting data” as their research question
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskStatistics/comments/15m46jl/question_statistical_test_for_for_relationships/
WTH do we do about it?
Interesting/humorous/sad comment (“linear regression hammer” is pretty funny).
>Suppose I post over there………..This will be received approximately like a person who claims to have done their own research and have proof that the earth is flat, and UFOs are actual aliens.
Just curious, did you learn about this response from experience?
I guess I am very fortunate in my experience. I am the only statistician at a small research department, and I started right out of school. The downside has been that I have no one to ask questions in person (Stan forum and this blog have been great), and the upside has been that I make all the decisions about analysis (also a downside because a bit scary with no senior person around and peer review of publications so unhelpful)! Early on, I begin reteaching myself data analysis, and I completely switched from what I had been taught in school (all Frequentist) to doing nothing but Bayesian modeling today. In all of the projects that I have been a part of, I have successfully convinced (or told) the PI that I would only do Bayesian analysis and better designs (within-person measures, etc). I haven’t used NHST since year 1 of my job. I have done a lot of explaining for the PIs, and had to prove that my approach was good, but everyone has been convinced. Based on my own experience, people just don’t really know, and the system for publishing and obtaining money is geared for noisy NHST gotta-find-my-finding approaches (I really think the system itself, more than education, is a root cause of these problems). My opinion is that many well-meaning and smart docs and researchers really believe that the main purpose of stats is that of an oracle that tells them if they have a ‘finding’ or not, provided that their sample size is big enough. I think people can be convinced otherwise. Perhaps not via Reddit though. I am fortunate enough to have stumbled across blogs like this and tools like Stan and brms, and had a strong conscience to investigate if I was really doing my work acceptably well, otherwise I probably would be right there with them. I know for sure, I’m not smarter than them. I think people really just don’t know.
> Just curious, did you learn about this response from experience?
Yeah, a bit. I started posting stuff about Bayesian stats and discouraging people from just seeking out “a test that will give them a low p value so they can publish their research” and got a bunch of pushback about how Bayesian methods are too advanced for most people or to just ignore me and go ahead and do a XYZ test to prove PDQ as a precondition of applying HJK method. Now I just read the sub so I can have a reason to be proud of myself for not drinking heavily.
You’re right that a lot of people really just don’t know, but also there are a lot of people who have built their careers around being the stats guy who rubber stamps other people’s research through knowing “the appropriate tests” to ensure “a true discovery”.
It makes me happy to hear you’ve found a place where you can do good work with bespoke models.
Daniel, this is not a direct answer, but some forms don’t lend themselves to high-quality responses. I think ppl. are likely to get much better advice on Cross-validated but I’m not sure why. Maybe because of how reputations and privileges work on Cross-validated?
The old man would remember that science-shaped nonsense has been popular as long as there was a mass reading public (Remember race ‘science’? Or eugenics? John Murray Spear and his Electrical Jesus? Mesmerism?) Rather than complain about the source, I would focus on keeping institutions from promoting it. Organizing an advertiser boycott of Spotify or getting a major academic institution to disown certain psychology departments could change behaviour, but being sad can not.
Institutions like Harvard are major promoters of bullshit science done by “real scientists”. I don’t see academic institutions as legitimate enterprises for the most part anymore. They’ve been subsumed under the general “enshittification” of everything:
Cory Doctorow coins the term:
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Some amplification of the idea:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet
yes, I realize academic institutions don’t directly follow the Doctorow thesis as it applies to internet middlemen, but in my opinion they are following a similar path. First start by building a brand as a high quality serious institution of teaching and research. The beneficiaries are the students. Then once enormous funds are available for teaching and research (starting in 1995 with Clinton signing changes to student loans and continuing with GWB signing prevention of bankruptcy cancellation of loans, and continuing til now with an enormous gravy train of both tuition and grants in biotech and etc…) The institutions cash out their reputations by rubber stamping degrees, and promoting a style of research that utilizes NHST based “discovery counterfeiting” to rake in the cash and give it to their ever growing administrator cadre. Of course cashing out a reputation built up over 200 years will take… at least several decades if not a century or so. So here we are with the enshittification of education and research ongoing as we speak and unlikely to stop any time in the next 50 years.
The difference between science shaped nonsense in the past and science shaped nonsense now is that the supposed “scientists” are heavy among the ones making the nonsense now. That goes for everything from beauty and sex ratio to economic policy analysis to cancer biology and string theory.
Sean –
+1.
Thanks for helping to keep me tethered.
Daniel Lakeland: pressuring academic institutions which participate in bad things is a lot like pressuring advertisers and distributors. Its a strategy which is often successful, but it takes organizing and patience and good old logos, ethos, and pathos.
From my point of view, most quantitative social science has smelled fishy since the oughties. I don’t see most of these fields as highly trusted. And to me, the trustworthiness of a field (ie. a global community of scholars) is much more important than the trustworthiness of a specific host university.
Unfortunately I don’t see Harvard or whatever as a particular exception or something that needs fixing, it’s **academia as a whole**. They are quite literally dismantling what makes them socially useful in favor of cashing out.
Pressuring them perhaps will have some good effect over a couple decades or whatever, but as far as I’m concerned they really plunged downward in social utility between about 1990 and 2010 as a whole across the board in every department and every way.
But, hey, at least we’ve got some really excellent water-parks https://www.collegeconsensus.com/rankings/best-college-waterparks/
and the dorms have excellent golf simulators, saunas, and DJ recording studios and such https://www.topuniversities.com/where-to-study/north-america/united-states/six-most-stunning-student-dorms-america
Daniel Lakeland: as the kids say, go touch grass
Planning to do that just as soon as we handle the fact that about 50% of all americans including those without loans believe that we should giving out $50000/person in student loan forgiveness because we fucked up so badly. Also when this graph of CPI Education expenses compared to CPI all items all urban consumers doesn’t show education increasing about 1.5x as fast as everything else in the economy.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=17J8n
Also while we have heavily overinvested in buildings, dorms, water parks, and rubber stamping degrees, in fact, over the next 20 years class sizes will shrink dramatically https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23428166/college-enrollment-population-education-crash and a large number of colleges and universities will go bankrupt (they already have been for a while now).
So no problems here, I’ll just go in my backyard and meditate for a while
Daniel Lakeland: I am not American. The reasons the kids say ‘touch grass’ is that especially since smartphones arrived, discussing policy on the Internet often leads to a feeling of helpless rage which usually shrinks or vanishes once we get outside, move things in the physical world, and work face to face with local people to improve things locally (and again, I am not American, and fancy dorms funded by high tuition fees for domestic students are not issues in the countries where I have lived and studied).
Sean, thanks for that clarification. The issue is not entirely specific to the US but is admittedly mostly a US issue. There is no “local” solution to it being as how it’s driven by federal policy and countrywide demographic and economic issues.
A huge part of the problem is the creation of a certain class of government subsidy that can only be consumed by attending a higher ed institution
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FGCCSAQ027S
Gives the asset level of the federal governments portfolio of loans owed to it and non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. In the US it is a routine joke that you can’t pull coffee shots at Starbucks without a masters degree because there are too many applicants with a bachelor’s.
In the mean time universities, very very busy hiring administrators, have decided that actual teaching is below their purpose, they have moved to hiring adjunct professors. Adjunct professors make up about 75% of the teaching workforce in the US, and earn less than people stocking shelves at Target
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/the-adjunct-professor-crisis/361336/
So yeah, touching grass occasionally is important in order to actually let people sustain the righteous rage at the US education and government system…
Daniel Lakeland: back in 2016, people who got up from their devices and organized with likeminded people locally brought in a national policy change to fix one of the issues with lab science in the USA: rules around wage and benefits which made it more efficient to hire graduate students than salaried research assistants (so labs which refused to increase the glut of lab science PhDs published less research per $100,000 of grants and had trouble winning the next grant). The administration which took office in 2017 undid that policy change, but if it was done once it can be done again. Its hard and it hurts, particularly for the kind of people who were drawn to the Internet before social media and are bruised from what happened afterwards, but it can be done.
@Sean M: “a national policy change to fix one of the issues with lab science in the USA: rules around wage and benefits which made it more efficient to hire graduate students than salaried research assistant” — Can you elaborate? I have no idea what your post is referring to.
Of course the really fun part is that this is what modern AI is using as training material
That’s the good news!
IGY is here! Just machines to make big decisions, programmed by fellas with compassion and vision, google meta tesla and Microsoft too, their coders know what’s best for youhooooo
You can use a press to print bibles or scientific treatise’ or books of the occult or instructions on how to make a nuclear weapon.
Going back a little further, you could have used words to explain to your dimwitted paleoanthrobro how to knap a piece of chert into a point, which they could have used to either get a delicious meal for their family or kill someone.
Soo…yeah, not a lot new here.