10 Comments

Pretty much had to happen this way at twitter, once EM stuck his fat hand in. By the way, I'm listening to Grouper (Liz harris), the "Shade" album. Melodies from the heavens, distance and distortions from Earth. Beautiful.

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Amen, Amen, Amen. Beautifully said.

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"That is, they seek to define signal for hundreds of millions of the rest of us."

When you distill everything down, this, I think, is really the driving force of it all.

Musk is a "free speech absolutist" as long as your worldview aligns with his. Comedy/parody is okay as long as he's not the punchline, and so on. It must be an incredible dissonance to try and manage, and getting what appears to be frankly terrible advice from the Paypal Mafia (and it's groupies) is just making a bad scene worse.

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That's an understandable position. However, I come from another spot. Before Musk, I never heard anyone but a conservative complain about Twitter. Now, it's all the liberals. Before EM, somebody was fiddling with the signal-to-noise ratio, but it was in a certain direction. It seems that it is going in the opposite direction now. It's fascinating to watch the pendulum swing, and the criticism is the same. Just from opposite camps.

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I think there are a number of assumptions here that I wouldn't accept - "conservative" "liberal" and "opposite camps" don't describe the professional debates regarding content moderation that have been ongoing throughout the social media era. And I think you are mistaking my use of signal-to-noise as applied to social media - it is not something that Musk or the previous owners of Twitter can alter at will, although certainly they both seek to profit from control of information.

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Thanks for that, I use the labels to generally describe loosely connected groups of people thinking along similar lines. I understood your use of the s-t-n ratio in social media to be: different groups want to control the flow, i.e. the ratio, to alter the narrative in their preferred direction. As the Twitter 2.0 files dump from Bari Weiss shows, the prior owners of Twitter were applying their signal-to-noise ratio to content moderation, resulting in censorship by other names. My overall point is that the ones complaining now about Twitter flowing "one way" didn't seem to be complaining when the flow went the other way.

I would love to read your take on the whole Twitter files dump. Do you agree that Twitter was effectively banning "conservatives"? Even an eminent doctor from Stanford.

I really enjoy your writing.

thanks

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Again, I think you are misreading what I meant by signal and noise. What I mean to call attention to is the loss of information that we are able to derive from what is labeled noise by engineers, because it is deleted from digital communications for efficiency sake. That has nothing to do with Musk's manufactured controversy, so far as I understand (but I'm not paying much attention to it in any case).

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Thank you so much for engaging with me. I reread the post, and agree completely with your perspective. But I feel like your perspective is informed by your musical and engineering familiarity. I flatter myself by thinking that my writing takes a more 30,000-foot view of topics. Interpretation of your piece, like ART and Music, can differ from the creator's original intent.

I equated sound engineers removing noise to "increase efficiency" of signal to social engineers removing content "to decrease misinformation" in a metaphorical sense. It seems to me that the Twitter Files are exposing that process.

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what a great post. Your definition of signal and noise is the most elegant I've heard. I recommended you to my readers and also linked to this post in my latest post. I hope you don't mind, but I've been reading your stuff for a bit now, and although I may not always agree, I love your prose. It's apparent your songwriting and poetry skills.

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Appreciate the compliments! Took a look at your post and yes, we disagree on a number of issues. Glad you enjoy this newsletter and that it has engaged your own thinking on these topics.

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