Does social media help or hurt social connection?

Ingenuism Weekly 28

“Trust is central to an economy that works.” –Stephen Covey

MEDIA

Does Facebook have a future? – Silicon Valley Examined 17

In this episode of the Silicon Valley Examined podcast, Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins are joined by special guest Yaron Brook to discuss the recent attacks on Facebook. What are the major criticisms leveled against the social media giant? Do they have merit? Or do they reflect looming threats to the Ingenuist principles that drive Silicon Valley?

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INSIGHT

Does social media help or hurt social connection?

Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins

There are three forms of connection: intellectual, economic, social.

Intellectual and economic connection are complements. Intellectual connection spawns new ideas and insights. Economic connection, facilitated by Money, transforms these ideas and insight into more insights and innovation, which provide a breeding ground for new ideas and insights. It’s a positive feedback loop for progress.

What about social connection? It, too, feeds progress.

Beyond the inherent value of social connection, social connection is pivotal to building trust. Trust is a key tenet of Ingenuism and the foundation of modern economies. It allows for specialization and division of labor. Even “trustless” technologies need trust to thrive. Is everyone going to validate every transparent blockchain algorithm? Evaluate every line of every distributed finance algorithm’s code? At some level we are trusting someone whenever we take action in contemporary society.

Trust is critical to Ingenuism functioning, as witnessed when we compare levels of trust and GDP. Here, for instance, is economist Christian Bjørnskov reviewing the empirical evidence and finding pretty much what other economists have concluded about the trust/growth link.

In all cases, the empirical pattern that the studies attempted to explain is similar to those illustrated in Figures 2 and 3. The figures combine the largest available sample of trust scores with the logarithms to real purchasing-power adjusted GDP per capita and real GDP produced in the industrial sectors of the country. The GDP and industry data are from CIA (2016) and combined, the sample covers a total of 136 countries of which 74 have been democratic all years between 1996 and 2015. Although both figures exhibit clear outliers, the overall correlations between social trust and real GDP per capita and real industrial output per capita, respectively, are .34 and .30. However, as I will discuss at the end of this section, the figures also exhibit that the association is substantially stronger in the subsample of countries that have been stably democratic for the last 20 years. The correlations are .56 and .54, respectively in the two subsamples while they are below .1 across non-democratic countries.

Trust matters. Trust supports progress and progress builds trust. Take away trust, you take away knowledge sharing and trade. Build trust—in other people, in key institutions—and knowledge sharing and trade flourish. In the absence of trust, connection neither magnifies learning nor empowers collaboration.

So, here’s the question. The Internet—in particular through social media platforms like Facebook—has dramatically increased connection. But what about trust? If social media breeds distrust, it negates the benefits of connection. Maybe to the point where the net benefit is negative despite the increased connection.

Is social media hurting society? Does Facebook, and large technology firms generally, need to be reined in, as many people in Washington DC and the mainstream media seem to believe?

The conventional wisdom is that social media has helped reduce trust in people and institutions. In his book Why We’re Polarized, Ezra Klein argues that algorithms radicalize us and help solidify group identities as they help us connect with these radical communities. Speaking of the evolution from the early internet to social media, Klein writes:

Few realized, early on, that the way to win the war for attention was to harness the power of community to create identity, and the simplest way to do that, particularly in politics, was to focus on enemies. But the winners emerged quickly, often using techniques whose mechanisms they didn’t fully understand—witness the reckoning Facebook has had to undergo facing up to the behavior their core product rewarded—and triggering an explosion of digital identities.

It’s all pretty plausible. For example, from 2004 to 2014 (last year data are available), the percent of Americans who think “most people can be trusted” has declined by about 5%.

The problem for the social media narrative is that this trend has been going on a long time—preceding the rise of the internet.

Same thing if we look at the public’s trust in the US government.

And if you look globally, trust trends vary by country—and not in any way that obviously tracks social media use.

What about if we zoom in and try to assess the impact of social media on trust more directly?

In a 2015 literature review, researchers Peter Håkansson and Hope Witmer found that:

Eight articles emphasized a positive relationship between social media and trust; two articles claimed no relationship between trust and social media. We did not find any studies claiming there is a negative relation between social media and trust.

Ten papers is not enough to draw firm conclusions. What we know for sure is this. Connection has huge benefits in an Ingenuist economy. Social media, and the Internet more broadly, dramatically increase connection: intellectual, economic, and social. And this increased connection is the linchpin of progress, both recent and going forward.

Given the overwhelming benefits connection makes possible, reducing connection should face a high hurdle—what are the clear and massive benefits that offset the cost of less connection? Destroying trust could meet that hurdle but so far the evidence is far from compelling. Falling trust appears to be a phenomenon distinct from social media.

That doesn’t mean that Facebook and other social media companies can’t do any better. They hopefully can and will figure out how to enhance trust along with connection. But this is not an issue with an easy answer (and certainly the federal government is not masterful at building trust).

From an Ingenuist perspective sacrificing connection is tantamount to undercutting the most powerful force for progress this world has ever seen. It should always be the last resort.

QUICK TAKES

Everything is tobacco

Apparently the latest talking point for Silicon Valley critics is that social media companies are tobacco companies, and need to be regulated the same way.

What’s the evidence? Well, it turns out that social media companies want people to use their products, and a lot of people do want to use their products, and some people use their products compulsively.

I mean, sure. But if that makes social media tobacco, then food is tobacco, Starbucks is tobacco, TV is tobacco, video games are tobacco, sports is tobacco…you get the point.

You can argue that Facebook is addictive—and it probably is for some people (but so are potato chips). But these days “addictive” is used so broadly that to the label means little more than that people like it.

The reason tobacco got its reputation as the ultimate corporate villain was because (a) their product didn’t have any obvious benefits and (b) it had major, life-threatening harms for many of its users, and (c) the companies lied about this for years.

That doesn’t describe social media companies. Love them or hate them, their products are like every other product on the planet: they have benefits and potential risks. It is hard not to think that comparing them to tobacco companies is a smear used by those who want control them.

The Wall Street Journal has more.

Breaking the barrier

The blood brain barrier does a pretty spectacular job of stopping dangerous things from reaching the brain. But that can be a big problem when it keeps out potentially life-saving drugs.

So this is welcome news:

A technique has been developed that could revolutionise the treatment of brain cancers and neurodegenerative diseases by temporarily allowing drugs and other substances to cross the blood brain barrier – a structure that separates the brain’s blood vessels from the rest of its tissues.

A trial in four women whose breast cancer had spread to the brain showed that magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) could safely deliver the antibody therapy Herceptin into their brain tissue, causing the tumours to shrink.

Who let the cat out of the bag?

I have two cats. And it also turns out I have like twenty friends who are allergic to cats, which pretty much means no one likes to visit me at home.

Possible solution: next time around, I could buy some hairless cats. But a cat’s job is to be cute and fluffy. Hairless cats are about as useless as decaffeinated coffee.

No, the future belongs to de-allergized cats.

This is a year when vaccines changed the lives of billions. Saiba's vaccine, HypoCat, delivers recombinant Fel d1and the coat from a plant virus (the Cucumber mosaic virus) without any vital genetic information. The viral coat serves as a carrier. A cat would need shots once or twice a year to produce antibodies that neutralize Fel d1 [the protein that causes most cat allergies].

HypoCat works much like any vaccine, with the twist that the enemy is the cat's own protein. Is that safe? Saiba's team has followed 70 cats treated with the vaccine over two years and they remain healthy. Again the active Fel d1 doesn't disappear but diminishes. The team asked 10 people with cat allergies to report on their symptoms when they pet their vaccinated cats. Eight of them could pet their cat for nearly a half hour before their symptoms began, compared with an average of 17 minutes before the vaccine.

And the future gets even better.

One day you might be able to bring your cat to the vet once a year for an injection that would modify specific tissues so they wouldn’t produce Fel d1.

Time to buy Fancy Feast stock. (This is not financial advice!)

Who’s going to tell him?

One of the common criticisms of Amazon is that it competes with some of the products on its site with its own product lines. Congressman David Cicilline, for example, recently tweeted:

Imagine if you ran a store and knew exactly which products would sell best. Rather than competing on the merits, you just copy those products, down to the smallest detail. 

Now imagine you place the original on the next aisle, on the highest shelf, out of view. You can’t lose.

TechFreedom points out the obvious:

In his attempt to skewer Amazon, the congressman revealed that he clearly hasn’t been grocery shopping lately (or, perhaps, is suffering from a rare, supermarket-specific form of amnesia). Tons of stores noticeably showcase their own generic products—usually unless another brand pays them to do otherwise.

The basic reason to take on a ton of risk in the effort to create a popular platform is that so that if you succeed in creating a popular platform you can benefit from it. The critics of Amazon seem to think Amazon’s job is to create a popular platform so that only other people can benefit from it.  

A good plumber is hard to find (in space)

One of the reasons we don’t appreciate progress is because we’re blind to most of the thorny problems innovators have to solve—and how hard those problems are to solve.

Like, you’re building spacecraft. Okay, you need powerful rockets. You need powerful computers. But, oh, by the way, you’re also going to need working toilets.

You’ve probably never pondered the details of space waste. But not to worry, the New York Times has it covered. After talking about some recent toilet challenges SpaceX has faced, the Times notes:

Mr. Gerstenmaier’s discussion of SpaceX’s toilet investigation offered a rare peek into how a private space company discovers, studies and fixes an engineering problem on multibillion-dollar spacecraft. There have been limits to public insight into new and often risky space vehicles as NASA puts much of its space transportation abilities into the hands of private companies, operating under contracting models that aim to slash the cost of sending people to space.

Toilets are crucial to NASA’s space exploration ambitions as the agency aims to trek beyond the space station, toward the moon and eventually Mars. Last year, the agency launched to the space station a new $24 million toilet, the Universal Waste Management System. 

$24 million for a toilet! Someone is getting stinkin’ rich.

Until next time,
Don Watkins

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