this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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Thus far in this thread I have suggested:
I'm sure there are other things that can be done if people are willing to sit down and think about what effects they want and how to achieve them.
To elaborate on #2, he's not going to listen to people if they don't first show that they understand what he's worried about. I believe Musk's ideals are very focused on optimizing for societal output, and that individuals (including himself) are expendable. He views society as an anthill, every human being just a cell in a larger body. Someone needs to help him realize that there are better metrics for a society, such as quality of life. I don't think he has ever experienced what that's like because he's never spent time in a healthy family where there is love, and where just being together is good enough. The only value he has ever known is whether you are producing something of material value. He needs to relearn. Ideally we'd convince him to voluntarily get therapy.
True, I could have identified those as suggested solutions (albeit rather broad and unspecific, which is perfectly fine). I also sympathise on both accounts.
I have this personal intuition that a lot of social friction could be mitigated if we took some inspiration from the principle of locality physics when designing social networks and structuring society in general. The idea of locality in physics is that physical systems interact only with their adjacent neighbours. The analogous social principle I have in mind is that interactions between people that understand and respect each other should be facilitated and emphasised, and (direct) interactions between people far apart from each other on (some notion of) a "compatibility spectrum" should be limited and de-emphasised. The idea here is that this would enable political and cultural ideas to be propagated and shared with proportionate friction, resulting in a gradual dissipation of truly incompatible views and norms, which would hopefully reduce polarisation.
The way it works today is that people are constantly exposed directly to strangers' unpalatable ideas and cultures, and there is zero reason for someone to seriously consider any of that since no trust or understanding exists between the (often largely unconsenting) audience and the (often loud) proponents. If some sentiment was instead communicated to a person after having passed through a series of increasingly trusted people (and after likely having undergone some revisions and filtering), that would make the person more likely to consider and extract value from it, and that would bring them a little bit closer to the opposite end of that chain.
Anyway, those are my musings on this matter.
That sounds like a great idea. There was a recent Kurzgesagt video about how similarity encourages us to work together, but this breaks down on the Internet where people are too different from one another.