Reading raw comments is like executing malware on your brain

Yea, no thanks. I don't want things filtered based on what someone else thinks I should see.

That's why I stick with platforms where hardline communist teenagers can curate what I'm exposed to.

Without wanting to be too aggressive, with only that quote to go on it sounds like that person wants to live in a safe zone where they're never challenged, angered, made afraid, or have to reconsider their world view. That's the very definition of an echo chamber. I don't think you're meant to live life experiencing only "approved" moments, even if you're the one in charge of approving them. Frankly I don't know how that would be possible without an insane amount of external control. You'd have to have someone/something else as a "wall" of sorts controlling your every experience or else how would things get reliably filtered?

I'd much prefer to teach people how to be resilient so they don't have to be afraid of being exposed to the "wrong" ideas. I'd recommend things like learning what emotions mean and how to deal with them, coping/processing bad moments, introspection, how to get help, and how to check new ideas against your own ethics. E.g. if you read something and it makes you angry, what idea/experience is the anger telling you to protect yourself from and how does it match your morality? How do you express that anger in a reasonable and productive way? If it's serious who do you call? And so on.

The real question then becomes: what would you trust to filter comments and information for you?

In the past, it was newspaper editors, TV news teams, journalists, and so on. Assuming we can't have a return to form on that front, would it be down to some AI?

Our mind is built on that "malware". I think it's more accurate to compare brain + knowledge to our immune system: the more samples you have, the better you are armed against mal-information.

I think the right approach would be to learn to deal with any kind of information, rather than to censor anything we might not like hearing.

Reminds me of Snow Crash by Nealyboi

Learn to practice good mental hygiene.

Not really. An executable controlled by an attacker could likely "own" you. A toot tweet or comment can not, it's just an idea or thought that you can accept or reject.

We already distance ourselves from sources of always bad ideas. For example, we're all here instead of on truth social.

Sounds like we're reinventing forum moderation and media literacy from first principles here.

Nah man, curl that shit into my bash and let me deal with it

We already have a firewall layer between outside information and ourselves, it’s called the ego, superego, our morals, ethics and comprehension of our membership in groups, our existing views and values. The sum of our experiences up till now!

Lay off the Stephenson and Gibson. Try some Tolstoy or Steinbeck.

Reading, watching, and listening to anything is like this. You accept communications into your brain and sort it out there. It's why people censor things, to shield others and/or to prevent the spread of certain ideas/concepts/information.

Misinformation, lies, scams, etc function entirely on exploiting it

I think most people already have this firewall installed, and it's working too well - they're absorbing minimal information that contradicts their self-image or world view. :) Scammers just know how to bypass the firewall. :)

Leaving aside the dystopian echo chamber that this could result in, you could argue that this would help with fake news by a lot. Fake news are so easy to spread and more present than ever. And for every person there is probably that one piece of news that is just believable enough to not question it. And then the next just believable piece of news. and another. I believe no one is immune to being influenced by fake stories, maybe even radicalized if they are targeted just right. A firewall just filtering out everything non-factual would already prevent so much societal damage I think.

In a way, the job of a teacher or journalist is to filter useful and/or relevant information for interested parties.

We already have a firewall its our thoughts. The information can nudge us but it's fighting an uphill battle against everything we already know and believe.

I remember watching a video from a psychiatrist with eastern Monk training. He was explaining about why yogis spend decades meditating in remote caves - he said it was to control information/stimuli exposure.

Ideas are like seeds, once they take root they grow. You can weed out unwanted ones, but it takes time and mental energy. It pulls at your attention and keeps you from functioning at your best

The concept really spoke to me. It's easier to consciously control your environment than it is to consciously control your thoughts and emotions.

Hüman brain just liek PC, me so smort.

You are responsible for what you do with the information you process. You're not supposed to just believe everything you read, or let it affect you. We don't need some government or organization deciding what can be shown online. Read history and see what follows mass censorship.

I've thought about this since seeing Ghost in the Shell as a kid. If direct neural interfaces become common place, the threat of hacking opens up from simply stealing financial information or material for blackmail; they may be able to control your entire body!

I look forward to factchecker services that interface right into the browser or OS, and immediately recognize and flag comments that might be false or misleading. Some may provide links to deep dives where it's complicated and you might want to know more.

I wonder if maybe it's more apt a comparison to say that allowing raw comments to affect you in a strong way is like running a random program as root. To a certain extent you have to let this kind of harmful content in.

P.s. the short story sounds cool - is it available to read anywhere?

I mean, this is just called censorship. We censor things for kids and all kind of people in or lives all the time. We censor things for ourselves when we don’t feel like reading the news or opening a text from a specific person. This is not some novel concept.

Yes, lemmy too is that. We need to meet people and then form groups online. I had devised a solution for exchanging public keys in person and verifying each content thereafter with that key.

People are thinking of the firewall here as something external. You can do this without outside help.

Who is this source. Why are they telling me this. How do they know this. What infomation might they be ommiting.

From that point you have enough infomation to make a judgement for yourself what a point of infomation is.

you already have that firewall. it's your experiences and human connections, your understanding of media, your personal history and learning and the feelings you experience.

you don't need a firewall to keep you from being manipulated, you need to learn to fucking read and think and feel. to learn and question, to develop trusted friends and family you can talk to.

if it feels like your emotional backdoors are being exploited then maybe youre thinking or behaving like a monster and your mind is revolting against itself.

Yeah the firewall is called "going outside more"

Do we have an iamverysmart community yet?

Having a will means choosing what to do. Denying the existence of a person’s will is dehumanizing.

i have a general distaste for the mind/computer analogy. no, tweets aren't like malware, because language isn't like code. our brains were not shaped by the same forces that computers are, they aren't directly comparable structures that we can transpose risks onto. computer scientists don't have special insight into how human societies work because they understand linear algebra and network theory, in the same way that psychologists and neurologists don't have special insight into machine learning because they know how the various regions of the human brain interact to form a coherent individual mind, or the neural circuits that go into sensory processing.

i personally think that trying to solve social problems with technological solutions is folly. computers, their systems, the decisions they make, are not by nature less vulnerable to bias than we are. in fact, the kind of math that governs automated curation algorithms happens to be pretty good at reproducing and amplifying existing social biases. relying on automated systems to do the work of curation for us isn't some kind of solution to the problems that exist on twitter and elsewhere, it is explicitly part of the problem.

twitter isn't giving you "direct, untrusted" information. its giving you information served by a curation algorithm designed to maximize whatever it is twitter's programmers have built, and those programmers might not even be accurately identifying what it is that they're maximizing for. assuming that we can make a "firewall" that maximizes for neutrality or objectivity is, to my mind, no less problematic than the systems that already exist, because it makes the same assumption: that we can build computational systems that reliably and robustly curate human social networks in ways that are provably beneficial, "neutral", or unbiased. that just isn't a power that computers have, nor is it something we should want as beings with agency and autonomy. people should have control over how their social networks function, and that control does not come from outsourcing social decisions to black-boxed machine learning algorithms controlled by corporate interests.