Ramps & Revelry, Student Debt, and My Advice to Elon Musk
Ramps and Revels
One of my favorite things about the North American springtime is the abundance of ramps which grow wild in the forest, usually around dead trees and moist stony areas. (Picking them without breaking the greens from the bulb is tricky. The buggers don’t yield easily.) My backyard is a hundred-acre wood, so I forage for them regularly while they last.
Ramp omelets and burgers are absolutely delicious, but I’ve done all kinds of other things with ramps, including Kashmiri style greens.
A few nights ago, I heard sounds of revelry at 4am. It sounded like a frat party gone wild, or McDougal Street at 2am in the summertime.
In upstate New York, that’s a coyote party in full swing.
A few days after the revelry I went out foraging for ramps and found the remnants from the coyote party.
The revelers had done a real number on this poor young stag. There was nothing left of the animal except for its skull and jaws, which had been wiped clean by the micro-feasters of the jungle.
It’s the first time I’ve seen a deer skull in so much detail. The complexity is impressive, with symmetric holes and passages to nourish or pass signals to various parts of the body. It’s mindboggling to think about the complexity that arises from our relatively simple genome – something I discussed in my episode with Tony Zador.
It’s literally a jungle out there!
Should Higher Education be a Public Good?
My latest podcast is with economic anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom about the crushing burden of college debt facing many middle-class Americans. We discussed a number of things, including how hard it is for American families even to talk about money, plan financially, and navigate the complexity of the ecosystem of loans. There’s a lot of pain out there. Many families are crushed by heavy debt for years, sometimes decades. There are many people my age who are still paying back such loans.
Growing up, I never equated education with something like owning a house, i.e. an asset. Education seemed more like food, and your parents tried to feed you the best they could. You didn’t borrow money to eat. It was unthinkable to graduate with that sword of debt dangling above you.
How things have changed. Education is now a multi-trillion-dollar industry that seems to encourage too much risk-taking by families.
It can’t be right for a society, especially a wealthy liberal democracy, to place a burden on its people for educating themselves. We should consider higher education not just as a private asset, but as a public good.
The Digital Public Square: My Advice to Elon Musk
The news of the month was Elon Musk and Twitter. Everyone is talking about it. Most of the chatter is cynical and pessimistic. There are genuine concerns about the difficulty of defining “free speech” on a social media platform. There are also concerns about Musk himself and that he will use Twitter for self-promotion. Others point to the fact that he’s already running four major companies and doesn’t have the bandwidth to manage Twitter. There are numerous concerns about a public square run by the richest man in the world.
But let’s start with what Musk has actually said he wants to do, and ask ourselves what questions we should be asking in order to go down the right path.
Musk proposes that Twitter’s algorithm for governing content should be open source and “there should be no behind the scenes manipulation, either algorithmically or manually.”
This makes sense to me: transparency of the rules of the public square. In a recent editorial, I expressed optimism about converging on a good set of rules based on dialog and data.
Musk admits he doesn’t have the answers. The point is, no one does. The more important question when it comes to all of this is “what are the questions we should be asking?” Not asking the right questions risks solving the wrong problem, and risks Twitter’s failure as a public square.
A crucial platform governance question is the following:
“what should be the culture of the digital public square in a liberal democracy & how do we create it?”
By culture I mean things like norms and civility of the platform. Social media platforms vary widely in terms of culture. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and StackOverflow have very different cultures. LinkedIn is civilized. Twitter is raw. Indeed, Musk himself posted this unflattering photo of Bill Gates recently.
A good example-setting exercise might be for Musk to show civility going forward, by nudging the norm in the right direction.
Culture is also largely driven by the “objective function” of a platform. For Facebook and Twitter, a central objective is to maximize engagement since this maximizes ad revenues. To the extent that human tendencies – such as our need to be valued and feel appreciated – maximize engagement, the algorithms stoke such tendencies, regardless of the side effects like polarization, incivility, and disengagement of moderate voices.
A better objective function might reward “usefulness” – in the spirit of the StackOverflow platform – instead of emotion. There could be others.
The culture of the platform would improve if we focus on users, not individual pieces of content posted by them. Content moderation suffers from what psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman calls “noise” in human decision-making. Even when the rules for decision-making are well-specified, different judges make opposite decisions on the same data, and individual judges are often inconsistent, impacted by irrelevant factors such as mood and weather. But, equally importantly, an algorithm’s mistakes can also cause unintended harm.
User moderation is much simpler. I’ve proposed simple “know your user” (KYC regulation), similar to what is required in our existing financial system. While people can use pseudonyms, they must be authenticated by the platform. Will this lead to more civility? Probably. Its easily testable.
Would there be mistakes? For sure, but they could be handled through an appeals process that is provided as a standard service by the platform operator.
So, What is the Role of Regulators?
The role of regulation is to specify the “constraints” of the public square – its guardrails – and ensure that it operates according to them. The Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon made an interesting observation about the relationship between objective functions and constraints: “If you allow me to determine the constraints, I don't care who selects the objective function.”
We are entering a new era of public-private partnership in operating the digital public square where square could well be operated privately, but is controlled by lawmakers. American history over the last two centuries is marked by important public-private partnerships in railroads, the postal service, digital communications, and defense. Now, it is about the public square. We are in unchartered waters, and need processes that harness the wisdom of the crowds while limiting their madness.
Until next time.
V/