There is No Algorithm for Truth - with Tom Scott

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Watching this now and it's fairly interesting to hear it triangulated from other people. He's a bit less driving than Tristan Harris gets in The Social Dilemma but he is talking about the complexity of the task held by platforms like Youtube to moderate their content, figure out how to keep people on (which means to some extent catering to the need for 'shiny' things), and challenges of effectively handling the throughput of 500 hours of new content being uploaded per minute without it either being illegal or age inappropriate content getting through in one set of circumstances or having a race to the bottom for outrage engagement as Harris et al have outlined.

Since you mentioned The Social Dilemma I thought I'd post a rebuttal:

We'd probably have to actually discuss it. I watched the first video about 16 minutes. I get where he's coming from and why he'd come to those conclusions, I'd agree that the movie can have a bit of a Zeitgeisty flavor but I've also spent plenty of time around the way hearing Tristan on Sam Harris's Waking Up / Making Sense podcasts as well as I've been, significantly longer, trailing Rebel Wisdom and GameB where they're at least chiming in on a lot of the same issues. I think Jordan Hall's idea that we're in a sort of interregnum between cultural institutions (his Blue Church and Red Religion) rings a lot of bells, and we're also in a very decadent place where things are going solipsistic in the Renee Girard scapegoating direction and as civic trust breaks down, and people are liking what the future looks like less and less, they're collapsing into fantasy and archetypal / unconscious modes.

There is a lot of harsh economics behind the current moment, a lot of institutional decay, and really the whole Bretton Woods idea that we'd be able to keep growing the economic pie long enough to prevent another world war by economic means seems to have hit natural (planetary) limits. There's also what seems to be what was already looking, by 2018 and 2019, like our slide toward neofeudalism and while it's great to bring the developing world's economic prospects up and it actually helps prevent starvation, disease, and environmental depletion to do that it can't be done while at the same time letting the developed world burn - otherwise the whole neoliberal project collapses as far right and far left populist parties start gaining traction with increasing numbers of disenfranchised citizens who want to throw the centrists out.

Where all of that goes - it's not a good time for social media platforms to be focusing on ways to just 'raise our level of engagement' on site and using the salt/sugar/fat approach which in essence just escalates the aforementioned problems.

Another thing that hit my radar recently is Tristan's conversations with Audrey Tang. What Audrey seems to be doing that's interesting everyone is being in the right position in Taiwan to try experimenting with both radical governmental transparency and finding schematic setups that emphasize both viewpoint diversity and places and issues that people in all political camps tend to agree on which can get resolution.