After you’ve already set up a Jekyll site on GitHub Pages, these are steps to help check it locally to avoid waiting for GitHub to publish it to make sure everything looks good.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"chruby (comes with Bundler)
brew install chruby ruby-installruby-install ruby 3.3.4
chruby install of the default macOS Ruby
echo "source $(brew --prefix)/opt/chruby/share/chruby/chruby.sh" >> ~/.zshrcecho "source $(brew --prefix)/opt/chruby/share/chruby/auto.sh" >> ~/.zshrcecho "chruby ruby-3.3.5" >> ~/.zshrc # run 'chruby' to see actual versionruby -vbundle update github-pagescd WEBDIRbundle installbundle exec jekyll serveIf everything goes perfect, the above steps will probably take around 20 minutes. Here are things that tripped me up:
The latest supported version of Jekyll and Ruby (described int he Jekyll docs) are not consistent with the GitHub Pages dependencies. Moncef Belyamani provides steps to install a new version of Ruby and get everything squared away. As of Jan 06, 2025, the version of Ruby to use is 3.3.4. The steps are abbreviated here:
ruby-install 3.3.4chruby 3.3.4cd WEBDIRecho "3.3.4" >> .ruby-versionruby File.read(".ruby-version").strip to the Gemfile.After I figured out that bundle update github-pages was correct, I kept get an old error about ?tainted not being a valid command. This is because of an old conflict with liquid-4.0.3 when the new dependencies require liquid-4.0.4. Manual uninstallation was required.
gem uninstall -aIxbundle update github-pagesRunning the site with bundle exec jekyll serve can create an error due to webrick being missing.
bundle add webrickbundle exec jekyll serveObserved pragmatic differences seen in autism spectrum disorder can be better explained as a difference in pragmatic principles rather than a deficiency in pragmatic skill. Although many studies have shown that communicative autistic people show lower performance in a variety of pragmatic tasks, including parsing ambiguity, understanding figurative language, and providing appropriate information in conversation, other work suggests that these results may not arise from an inability to grasp pragmatics. Recent studies indicate with autism have a coherent and consistent set of communication principles that differ from non-autistic communicators, and autistic communicators do not universally lack the ability to understand the pragmatic reasoning of non-autistic people. This evidence challenges a model where pragmatics is derived from processes like rational decision-making, though additional work is needed to support these objections.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which is the current accepted diagnostic code in the DSM, will be referred to as autism as shorthand. This paper will focus on verbally communicative autistic people whose intelligence is within normal range, often classified under the unofficial diagnosis of high-functioning autism (HFA). Using the term autistic will refer to individuals in this part of the spectrum unless indicated otherwise. Additionally, although the term “Asperger’s” occurs in some of the cited studies, this diagnosis is discouraged by autism rights advocates and has fallen out of use in official circles.
Autism spectrum disorder, as described by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, has the essential feature of “persistent impairment in reciprocal social communication and social interaction” (1). People with autism spectrum disorder demonstrate difficulties in understanding figurative language, parsing ambiguous meanings, detecting pragmatic violations, and providing appropriate information in conversation (2, 3). Although this evidence is considered indicative of pragmatic weaknesses in autism, additional work suggests that the results cannot be simply explained as inability. Current work supports a “double empathy problem” between autistic and non-autistic groups, where social impairments result not from social deficit, but a mismatch in perception and attitude that affects both autistic and non-autistic people (4). The communication divergence underlying the double empathy problem may be rooted in a different set of pragmatic rules between the groups.
Grice, in Logic and Conversation, established the foundations of pragmatics by proposing that conversation is rational and strategic, and communicators cooperate to encode more meaning into statements than the literal semantics of an utterance (5). Grice proposes that conversation follows maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner, which allow for listeners to draw implicatures.
Implicatures are conclusions that can be drawn from speech that are not necessarily logical entailments. For example, statements that use “some” often produce the scalar implicature of “not all”, even though “some” only entails “not none”. This implicature arises because speakers usually try to be maximally informative and using “all” is more informative than “some”, as the former is a strict subset of the latter.
However, the maxims do not fully explain all features of non-literal language, which are often dependent on social context, shared perspective, and accepted cultural norms. For example, there are gendered differences in usage of verbal irony or sarcasm, with authors attributing the more frequent usage of irony in men as indicative of a higher inclination toward risk-taking rather than a different set of pragmatic goals (6).
These considerations do not completely rebut Gricean machinery, as the original framework allows for the incorporation of additional information for inference. It is probably uncontroversial to claim, for example, that someone will adopt a different set of pragmatics to parse the veiled, passive-aggressive language of a professional meeting compared to an open, straightforward, and private conversation with close friends. Better understanding of the factors that can affect the situational pragmatic framework used by communicators can further the understanding of the communication differences seen in autism.
Although some autism researchers claim that “pragmatic language impairments are universal” in ASD (7), this group may be better characterized as having pragmatic differences rather than deficits. A review of pragmatic studies in autism, conducted by Loukusa and Moilanen in 2009, found that autistic people (ranging from 6 to 57 years of age) consistently displayed “weaknesses” across a variety of pragmatic tests, including idiom comprehension, non-literal language interpretation, and contextual inference from stories (8).
However, many studies included in the review find that pragmatic abilities are well-conserved for simpler pragmatic tests in both autistic children and adults. Additionally, a more recent 2018 study of scalar implicatures found that autistic children and non-autistic children had similar judgments when expressing agreement/disagreement with underinformative statements. Differences were noted when children were presented with a third, middling option (“I agree a bit” rather than “I agree” or “I disagree”), with autistic children preferring the stronger binary responses (9). A similar study performed with adults drew similar conclusions, finding no significant differences between scalar implicature judgments between the autistic and non-autistic participants (10).
The preservation of simpler pragmatics and divergence in more complex communication suggests two possible theories. First, consistent with prevailing views, pragmatics deficiencies are only visible at more complex tasks because the pragmatics skill or talent in autistic people is only sufficient to handle simpler inferences. However, these results could also suggest that autistic people have the same pragmatics machinery as non-autistic people, indicated by the similar performance in the straightforward, rationality-derived inference tests, and divergence in more complex tasks arises from differences in dealing with uncertainty when rational inference does not resolve all the ambiguity in the statement. These differences will be explored later, in “Tentative description of an autistic communication framework.”
This section will explore arguments against the first interpretation that autistic people lack pragmatics skill. The previously cited review by Loukusa and Moilanen identified two main streams of thought for explaining deficiency: weak central coherence and impaired theory of mind.
Weak central coherence proposes that individuals with autism tend to have difficulty interpreting information because of lack of an ability to integrate information from different sources and tendency to interpret utterances in isolation. This reasoning is sometimes also subsumed into a broader theory of executive dysfunction, which claims that autistic individuals may have impaired planning, ability to allocate attention, and mental flexibility. Additionally, some autism researchers propose that theory of mind is related to ironic understanding, claiming that pragmatic comprehension difficulty is related to difficulties with theory of mind in autistic individuals.
These current explanations seem contradicted by existing evidence that autistic people do possess these capabilities. For example, autistic individuals appear to score similarly to non-autistic controls on simple theory of mind assessments (8). Additionally, some autistic people are competent at modeling the mental processes of non-autistic communicators, which will be explored later in discussions of masking.
Weak central coherence is not consistent with other, non-verbal studies of autistic individuals. Lopez and Leekam contrasted the ability of autistic children and IQ-matched controls to extract information in different situations, finding that autistic children did not significantly differ from non-autistic peers in tasks of accounting for visual/verbal context and visual/verbal semantic memory. Autistic children only showed differences in an experiment of disambiguating homographs, suggesting a specific divergence in complex verbal stimuli that required using sentence context to disambiguate meaning (11). However, interpretation of some studies on autism, including this one, are complicated by a now-outdated distinction between high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger’s syndrome. Asperger’s syndrome was retired as a DSM diagnostic code in 2013 and folded under the broader category of autism spectrum disorder.
However, an eye-tracking study observed that in verbal contexts, autistic children use context to quickly resolve ambiguity, similar to non-autistic controls (12). Differences may be related to specific semantic tasks that require an autistic listener to account for the behavior of a non-autistic speaker, rather than central coherence inability. However, it may be possible that weak central coherence theory could be modified to only suggest connectivity deficiencies in the auditory processing stream while allowing for retained performance in other areas, like visual processing.
Additional evidence in autistic adults also does not clearly support weak central coherence. A study found autistic men performed as well as non-autistic controls on central coherence tests, though the former group took significantly longer on the same tasks (13). This evidence could support weak central coherence, but does not reject the theory that those with autism may have different intrinsic preferences for how they use contextual evidence and require more time to adjust to the “correct” standard answer of the test battery.
Additional evidence of autistic “masking” supports a model of many autistic people being capable of identifying and executing appropriate conversational moves. Within the last decade, more studies have focused on how women and girls with autism can, with some effort, mask autistic traits and appear to be non-autistic (though masking is not limited to women, work in this group is better characterized). One of the earliest studies on camouflaging, conducted in 2016, noted that many of the respondents reported “pretending to be normal”, with many practitioners overlooking an autism diagnosis due to their ability to hide autistic traits (14). In many cases, autistic women may never receive a diagnosis or exhibit any observable functional impairments (15).
Even with “successful” camouflaging, autistic women report high levels of stress, anxiety, and exhaustion (15). The study of camouflaged autism remains under-studied, though progress has been made in the development of the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q), which reflects observations that autistic individuals may practice “normal” social indicators like body language and facial expression and closely observe and imitate non-autistic communicators (16).
These results suggest a weak rebuttal of the assumption that pragmatic deficiencies are a hallmark of autism. For at least some autistic individuals, there is no underlying inability to imitate the mannerisms of non-autistic communicators. Possibly, distress with masking suggests that the pragmatics “skill” of this group is impaired, though
The above evidence suggests that theories of autistic deficiency insufficiently explain observed autistic communication patterns. Additional evidence on autistic peer-to-peer communication further suggests that autistic people converge on a different pragmatic framework.
A study by Crompton et al. found that groups of all-autistic and all-non-autistic communicators had similar levels of rapport and information retention, and a group of mixed autistic and non-autistic communicators saw decreased rapport and communication fidelity (17). Crompton et al. used daisy chains, lines of people passing along a story, to measure how communicators retain and describe features of a scenario. Communication ability was measured using the proportion of details recalled, and rapport was measured as self-reported comfort with the teller and receiver of the story.
The equal effectiveness of communication between all-ASD and non-ASD groups indicates that autistic communication, rather than being a set of random perturbations of conventional communication, is consistent within a group of only autistic people. The study’s researchers explicitly endorse the double empathy problem of autism, which describes how autistic and non-autistic people have two different neurotypes that make cross-group communication difficult. These neurotypes entail differences in perspectives and preferences that affect an approach to social situations. There is a “double” problem because both groups have difficulty modeling the other, though we have seen with camouflaging that autistic people may be more successful in doing so due to overlying social and cultural incentives to blend in with the majority.
Outlining the exact differences in pragmatics for an autistic neurotype is difficult because empirical studies finding differences in pragmatic performance rarely interrogate deeper mechanisms. Aggregated personal accounts by masked autistic people provides some guidance, as these people are usually attuned to different social needs and have determined appropriate compensatory strategies.
Many autistic people learn to correct for being more warm and friendly, using habits like doing research on friends before small talk or asking people about their feelings and not talking about themselves. It is also common for autistic people to realize that they have hyper-fixations on specific topics and then restrict their discussion of these areas. Additionally, autistic people often mask as being more “humble” by pretending to not know answers to questions and not correcting people on facts (18, p. 42). Qualities shared by autistic people include having a deliberative processing style or processing the world “from the bottom up”, with less reliance on heuristics to make decisions (18, p. 14).
The traits suggest common preferences that may affect Gricean maxims. Preference for deliberation and truth over heuristics suggest that the boundary of “quality” information may be higher in autistic people. Difficulty with natural small talk suggests a higher standard for relevance. There also seems to be some movement of the boundary of relevance toward personal preference of topics, with masking autistic people realizing that what they find interesting is often not relevant for others. A penchant for deliberation could move the boundary on the maxim of quantity, with a tendency toward providing more information to resolve anticipated ambiguity. This difference would explain the differences between autistic and non-autistic children when resolving scalar implicatures, with the former preferring binary agree/disagree responses rather than partial agreement.
It seems that a cooperative principle governing autistic communication will incentivize precise language with a preference to derive the most practical rather than social or reputational benefit from conversations. Social or reputational benefit arises from sharing of friendly, materially irrelevant rapport, such as small talk, inquiries into personal life, etc., which often contains information with no expectation of retention.
Outside of Gricean pragmatics, other theories may be able to account for pragmatic differences in autistic people. Relevance theory, a more formal theory of communication compared to Grice’s original outline, describes how expectations of relevance are enough to allow listeners to decode speaker meaning (19).
Relevance is related to positive cognitive effect, or “a worthwhile difference to the individual’s representation of the world”, and the processing effort, or the amount of inference, perception, and memory required to understand the input. Wilson and Sperber propose that “Other things being equal, the greater the processing effort expended, the lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time” (19, 251–252). The systemic cognitive differences in autistic people, such as less reliance on heuristics, could fit into a relevance theory framework that emphasizes processing effort.
Discussion of systemic differences in autistic pragmatics is also made difficult by unclear distinctions between autism and other social communication disorders. The most updated DSM-V, for example, made the move of aggregating many autistic disorders into a single spectrum diagnosis, while also separating out a separate diagnosis for Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder (SPCD).
SPCD is distinguished from ASD by a lack of repetitive and restricted behaviors (RRB), and would have previously fallen under some autism diagnosis prior to the DSM-V. Pushback against the ASD/SPCD division claims that the distinction between the two diagnoses is unclear, with some practitioners raising concerns about individuals with SPCD being denied ASD-specific support that would otherwise be helpful (20). The line between ASD and SPCD will inform whether a full explanation of pragmatic differences in ASD should also be able to account for the cognitive differences that lead to ASD-characteristic RRB, or whether the differences in language network connections can largely be analyzed independently of these other behavioral manifestations.
For the former, a strength of the weak central coherence theory is that it partially explains why autistic people avoid stimuli like loud noises or crowd, as the inability to appropriately filter language can be related to a similar inability in non-verbal stimuli. If more evidence points to the latter hypothesis (that pragmatic differences are largely separate from other cognitive/behavioral differences), pragmatics may be better understood as a specific social network or cognitive adaptation that exists outside of cognitive processes like reasoning ability and information comprehension. This hypothesis, however, needs further support, possibly from cognitive science, to explain the apparent convergence in communication ability within groups of only autistic people.
For verbal, IQ-matched autistic people, pragmatic deficit does not capture the full picture of communication divergence with non-autistic people. In many cases, simpler pragmatic applications and inferential tasks are consistent with non-autistic controls, suggesting reasonable comprehension of maxims and cooperativity. Cases of autistic people camouflaging, with some effort, with non-autistic society suggest not an inability, but an intrinsic preference against non-autistic communication. Additionally, communication performance within autistic groups suggests consistency in pragmatic differences.
Shared behavioral traits and decision-making of autistic people suggest a framework of communication that is more informative and precise, leading to different pragmatic principles and choices. Further work needs to be performed to investigate the experience of autistic people, especially masked autistic people, to delineate the specific pragmatic deviations. Answering this question may also raise considerations about how much of pragmatics can be derived from processes like rational decision-making versus a contribution from more specific social learning and practice.
(1) American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. American Psychiatric Association. Page 53.
(2) Schaeken, W., Van Haeren, M., & Bambini, V. (2018). The Understanding of Scalar Implicatures in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Dichotomized Responses to Violations of Informativeness. Frontiers in Psychology, 9. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01266
(3) Volden, J. (2017). Autism Spectrum Disorder. In L. Cummings (Ed.), Research in Clinical Pragmatics (pp. 59–83). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47489-2_3
(4) Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.
(5) Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation (pp. 41–58). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368811_003
(6) Colston, H. L., & Lee, S. Y. (2004). Gender Differences in Verbal Irony Use. Metaphor and Symbol, 19(4), 289–306. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms1904_3
(7) Volden, J. (2017). Autism Spectrum Disorder. In L. Cummings (Ed.), Research in Clinical Pragmatics (pp. 59–83). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47489-2_3
(8) Loukusa, S., & Moilanen, I. (2009). Pragmatic inference abilities in individuals with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. A review. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 3(4), 890–904. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2009.05.002
(9) Schaeken, W., Van Haeren, M., & Bambini, V. (2018). The Understanding of Scalar Implicatures in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Dichotomized Responses to Violations of Informativeness. Frontiers in Psychology, 9. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01266
(10) Pijnacker, J., Hagoort, P., Buitelaar, J., Teunisse, J.-P., & Geurts, B. (2009). Pragmatic Inferences in High-Functioning Adults with Autism and Asperger Syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 39(4), 607–618. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-008-0661-8
(11) López, B., & Leekam, S. R. (2003). Do children with autism fail to process information in context? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 44(2), 285–300. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-7610.00121
(12) Hahn, N., Snedeker, J., & Rabagliati, H. (2015). Rapid Linguistic Ambiguity Resolution in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Eye Tracking Evidence for the Limits of Weak Central Coherence. Autism Research, 8(6), 717–726. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1487
(13) Walęcka, M., Wojciechowska, K., & Wichniak, A. (2022). Central coherence in adults with a high-functioning autism spectrum disorder. In a search for a non-self-reporting screening tool. Applied Neuropsychology: Adult, 29(4), 677–683. https://doi.org/10.1080/23279095.2020.1804908
(14) Bargiela, S., Steward, R., & Mandy, W. (2016). The Experiences of Late-diagnosed Women with Autism Spectrum Conditions: An Investigation of the Female Autism Phenotype. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46(10), 3281–3294. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-2872-8
(15) Allely, C. S. (2018). Understanding and recognising the female phenotype of autism spectrum disorder and the “camouflage” hypothesis: A systematic PRISMA review. Advances in Autism, 5(1), 14–37. https://doi.org/10.1108/AIA-09-2018-0036
(16) Hull, L., Mandy, W., Lai, M.-C., Baron-Cohen, S., Allison, C., Smith, P., & Petrides, K. V. (2019). Development and Validation of the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(3), 819–833. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-3792-6
(17) Crompton, C. J., Ropar, D., Evans-Williams, C. V., Flynn, E. G., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2020). Autistic peer-to-peer information transfer is highly effective. Autism: The International Journal of Research and Practice, 24(7), 1704–1712. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361320919286
(18) Price, D. (2022). Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity. Harmony/Rodale.
(19) Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (2002). Relevance Theory. Proceedings of the Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, Tokyo, Japan.
(20) Brukner-Wertman, Y., Laor, N., & Golan, O. (2016). Social (Pragmatic) Communication Disorder and Its Relation to the Autism Spectrum: Dilemmas Arising From the DSM-5 Classification. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46(8), 2821–2829. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-016-2814-5
]]>Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Henry Holt and Company, 2018.
The book is 160 pages and not very dense. It’s light on images and figures, which makes eBook reading a breeze.
The cat on the book’s cover represents Lanier’s call for people to approach social media like cats rather than dogs. Lanier values that cats, unlike dogs, still maintained their independence and resistance to obedience after domestication. Social media creates a society of dogs, trained to turn on a dime and beg for scraps of attention. Continuing the animal metaphor, Lanier criticizes how current social media business models flip a person’s “pack/individual” switch to “pack”, to the detriment of individual critical thinking. Lanier uses the term “Solitary Wolf”, but I will avoid it because I think Lanier’s grasp of animal behavior is questionable.
The following are Lanier’s ten arguments, quoted from the chapter titles:
Many of the above depend on the same fundamental structures, often making the book repetitive. For example, Arguments 1 to 7 can be attributed to personalization of feeds and optimization toward user engagement, which often taps into outrage and negative emotions. Lanier summarizes the underlying infrastructure and business models that causes the perceived problems as BUMMERs.
Social media corporations that depend on targeted ads and data mining, like Meta (still named Facebook when published) and Google, are described as “Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent”, or BUMMER.
This whimsical and contrived acronym often feels inappropriately silly. For example, when describing how social media business exacerbates violent extremism, Lanier says “racism became organized over BUMMER to a degree it had not been in generations” (109). Relatedly, Lanier describes how “All the Russian agents had to do was pay BUMMER for what came to BUMMER naturally” (109) when describing international political conspiracy.
Continuing his preference for itemized lists, on page 30 Lanier describes the ABCs of BUMMERs as
Though Lanier focuses on criticizing the broad societal impact of social media, he glosses over how positive change will actually occur. To be fair, the book’s title only promises to try and convince you to delete your own accounts rather than fight the system. But considering the stakes laid out, this feels futile. It’s similar to the trend of covering webcams after the leak of NSA spying programs. If you escape the social media machine, what if your neighbors and elected officials haven’t? And if the ultimate goal is to enact change through everyone deleting their accounts, then this probably also calls for people to shift how they organize and demand corporate responsibility.
Corporations are anthropomorphized throughout the book, obscuring responsibility. Lanier claims his acquaintances at Google or Facebook are well-meaning and instead vaguely blames the company for the harm it produces. Although Lanier emphasizes individual responsibility for deleting accounts, the steps after and the practical measures people can take to enact widespread change are handwaved. Lanier leaves solutions to the companies that perpetuated the problem.
Lanier’s enthusiasm for individual freedom seems shaky as the driving motivation of the book because he misses awareness of the tug-of-war between responsibility and freedom. For example, with the pack/individual switch, Lanier’s illustrative example of the benefits of individual thinking is a classic “wisdom of the crowd” example of guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar. Present a large enough room with a jar of jelly beans, average everyone’s individual guesses, and the average will tend to converge on the correct answer (47). I’m pretty sure I made a similar argument in high school when I still believed the dogma that freedom of speech is the best thing ever (spoiler: it’s more complicated than that.)
Jelly bean estimation works because the true answer is objective, people know the task at hand, and everyone is trying their best. We could easily ruin the example by someone deciding that there are negative one billion jelly beans in the jar.
And even if everybody is acting in good faith, the average opinion could still be wrong, especially with moral questions. If you averaged everyone in 1845, we probably would not morally converge to the correct answer, which is that enslaving people is not good. Same with the early 1900s and women’s suffrage. Even now, the global average doesn’t look too rosy for gay rights or women’s equality.
This is an illustrative strawman; obviously, Lanier would not advocate for making decisions based on averaging responses. But it highlights that individuals thinking about core societal issues are probably going to trend toward falling into the ruts ingrained in them by their surrounding culture with or without social media. Social media only traces and deepens existing ruts, so quitting can only do so much.
I think the book misses an opportunity to take a shot at this larger issue that social media reveals, this question about our responsibility to each other. Lanier, in the conclusion, demurs and points the reader to Sherry Turkle and Cathy O’Neil (without naming any specific works) for more commentary on specific social issues. Lanier’s background is in Silicon Valley and computer science, so maybe he didn’t feel comfortable tackling anything beyond the observation that “social media bad” and the solution “don’t use social media”. But without this framework, the book seems hollow, a “not my problem” response to pretty terrible things that are our collective responsibility.
There are random snippets throughout the book that made me raise an eyebrow.
They are selfish, so wrapped up in their cycle that they don’t have much time to notice what others are feeling or thinking about…A personal mythology overtakes addicts. They see themselves grandiosely and, as they descend further into addiction, ever less realistically (40).
These sweeping character snapshots of an extremely diverse crowd seem inaccurate, designed to scare readers into not wanting to be BUMMER “addicts” rather than being an honest summary of addiction, which results from a complicated interplay of factors. At worst, descriptions like these deaden empathy for those suffering from addiction. After reading Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe, which focuses on the Sackler-produced opiate crisis in America, I think that many addicts fully realize the extent of their problem but chemical dependence renders them unable to respond. One patient in Empire of Pain, who asked for OxyContin on personal recommendation from the Sackler/Purdue head corporate lawyer, eventually realized the extend of the problem and attempted to testify against Purdue Pharma. In response, the legal defense humiliated her, attacking her character and perceived selfishness and greed.
People who dig too deep into social media become assholes becomes of the unique incentives in the system, not because addicts are assholes. Lanier stretching a metaphor to addiction seems unnecessary and misplaced.
Because of the dilemma I just mentioned, I don’t want to criticize people who seem to like the situation—for instance, young people who are trying to be social media influencers (63).
Lanier’s dilemma is his focus on freedom conflicting with writing a book telling you what to do. I think he should be creating an argument that discourages people from becoming influencers, otherwise this seems like a weird concession that weakens the book’s purpose. Even having this dilemma highlights the previous point about Lanier not having a framework of social responsibility that extends beyond freedom.
Lanier is optimistic about podcasts, claiming that long-form audio entertainment avoids the pitfalls of image- or text-based timelines. He imagines podcasts could be made worse by platforms that splice specific segments and generate a sort of personalized audio timeline.
Podcasts tend to get away with loose citing, overly bombastic, and off the cuff. I think Lanier’s construction of a corrupted podcast platform is contrived and misses the mark. Twitch, YouTube live, and the rising popularity of live chats (which I’m pretty sure existed when Lanier wrote the book) are closer to how podcasts became another notch in corporate social media, creating echo chambers and constructing of social media stars who market their life and personality.
The weirdness is normalized when BUMMER customers, who are often techies themselves, accept AI as a coherent and legitimate concept, and make spending decisions based on it.
…We forget that AI is a story we computer scientists made up to help us get funding…
AI is a fantasy, nothing but a story we tell about our code. It is also a cover for sloppy engineering. Making a supposed AI program that customizes a feed is less work than creating a great user interface…and this is so because AI has no objective criteria for success (136).
With recent developments in image generation programs, large language models, etc., dismissing the looming technology of artificial intelligence seems misplaced. I agree with Lanier that certain fancy image processing and machine learning was packaged as artificial intelligence to draw in grants and venture capital, but now it’s undeniable that there is plenty of momentum behind creating thinking machines that could displace human intellectual work. Diving deeper into why artificial intelligence and associated AI threats aren’t a “fantasy” is for another time, but Lanier is probably far off the mark in terms of tone and insight into how this technology evolved. DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and ChatGPT are already forcing employers, educators, and researchers to rethink human intellectual work and valued skills.
The Saudis are not the only ones who promote empathy for mute props as a way to deny empathy to real but muzzled humans. It’s also been done in the name of anti-abortion activism and animal rights (n.p.)
For context, the comment about the Saudis refers to rights being granted to a feminine AI chatbot when the same rights are not granted to Saudi women.
Framing animal rights activism as comparably morally questionable to violent misogyny is incongruous. My interpretation of Lanier’s stance is that he thinks animal rights activists are using their position of anti-speciesism to “deny empathy” to…people who abuse animals? Probably, Lanier eats meat and doesn’t like vegans moralizing to him.
![[2023-01-04-Lanier-kittens.jpg]] Let’s say Person A kicks two kittens off of a tree stump and Person B accosts them. Person A claims that they want to sit on the tree stump and Person B is infringing on their happiness. It would not be typical to think, “wow, Person B is using kittens as a prop and denying empathy to Person A.”
Vegans and animal activists extend that moral framework to be consistent across species. Going into arguments for veganism is another post, but let’s assume that humans can thrive eating far fewer animals than is typical. Also, assume that animals suffer and are conscious. Industrialized agriculture and meat-eating would naturally seem morally egregious. For someone who takes their moral impact seriously, ending these practices would be especially important and they cannot afford to give people who perpetuate these moral atrocities leeway.
For me, Lanier’s inclusion of this statement really cheapens the entire emotional impact of the book. When the main message is about empathy and preserving your values, it feels quite shallow to also throw in a poorly thought out potshot at a group that probably has done a lot of self-reflection into their moral choices. Although social media may contribute to a more aggressive vegan community, it doesn’t seem to be on the same level as groups that see women as subhuman and disposable.
Capitalism isn’t supposed to be a zero-sum game.
BUMMER is economically unsustainable, which is even worse, perhaps, than its being unfair. Bringing down a society to get rich is a fool’s game, and Silicon Valley is acting foolishly (102).
I think this is Lanier trying to be an edgy capitalist libertarian rather than making a serious statement. I don’t take it on faith that any of the above is true or useful for modeling the world. Historical evidence seems to indicate that, when the world is largely capitalist and neoliberal, getting rich at the expense of others is actually a pretty successful strategy for an individual. Using the Sacklers’ example again, it doesn’t seem like they’re too bad off after the multitude of lawsuits. Sure, they have a victim complex, but they’re still enormously wealthy and their family name is plastered over buildings and museums worldwide. It may have been a “fool’s game” for broader humanity, but the individual actors played intelligently and evaded responsibility for losses incurred by the public.
Lanier occasionally gestures to his political and economic stances throughout the book (broadly progressive, doesn’t like stereotypical liberals or extreme conservatives, neoliberal) and I think there was room for more interesting discussion of the economic incentives that guide patterns in social media. Lanier believes that there’s a more economically sustainable (read as: profitable) version of social media that also has less of these social pitfalls. Though if he believes economic unsustainability is worse than being unfair, he probably wouldn’t mind too much if it wasn’t completely clean in terms of its social impact. But probably the best “solution” for social media is for it to be not profitable and fair, which isn’t explored here.
Lanier’s arguments feature prominently in the original Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (2020), which also suffers from tonal issues. The presentation of facts is interspersed with a subplot following a family dealing with their screenagers. These scenes often feel contrived and unnecessary.
Additionally, Lanier-style, The Social Dilemma anthropomorphizes the personalized social media feed. The algorithm is represented as three people in a digital control room tasked with constantly analyzing a user’s environment and strategizing about how to deliver content. Their roles range from deducing who a user’s ex is to shoving extremist political content into YouTube feeds. The image of being beholden to the distant decisions of pasty nerds probably tried to trigger viewers’ aversion to manipulation but ends up seeming melodramatic and unserious.
Throughout reading, I kept comparing my book to other self-help or lifestyle books I enjoyed more.
The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo is great at delivering memorable, actionable information interspersed with illustrative personal experiences.
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb hardly counts as self-help, but it occasionally provides pretty memorable and robust advice in between takedowns of conventional economics, news media, and statisticians. Taleb’s acerbity is hardly elegant but is certainly entertaining.
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) also barely fits into this category. The book is part autobiography, part investigative journalism into meat production. Foer makes a strong ethical stance, takes his audience seriously, and adds in enough gross-out anti-factory meat production information to make a case without being tasteless.
Good for Lanier for building a career without social media. Depending on your field, it’s probably helpful to have some kind of social media presence. During COVID-19 for example, epidemiologists used Twitter to a) rapidly inform the public of scientific details otherwise skipped over in popular media, and b) spread information that would otherwise be slowed down by the arduous scientific publication process. Not perfect, but probably net positive for saving lives.
Also, connecting to a previous point before, unless everyone quits social media, it’s still useful. For example, I publicize things over social media because it’s the best way to reach people, no argument. Lanier’s book could as easily be arguments for minimally useful social media use. Besides making the title snappier, I don’t think any of his arguments require that one quits rather than reduces.
These are measure to make social media healthier. I still hate it though.
Meta platforms often default to showing a personalized feed. I haven’t found an easy workaround for this besides removing suggested posts that aren’t from friends (often through an option menu on each post). Or, probably easier, ignoring the feed and going to the useful features, like direct messaging and posting.
Backend access to YouTube is possible and often allows for very granular customization (such as removing the cesspool that is the comments section). But I’m not sure these platforms are legal and I won’t say I’ve personally used them.
Most social media also now has options to “depersonalize” your experience, opting you out of targeted ads or customization. Given that companies even have this option, I have little faith in their effectiveness. Try it anyway. I often use a VPN set to some random non-English speaking country to further depersonalize ads by making them incomprehensible.
Adding website blockers helps. Most of them are fine, so no specific recommendations from me.
It sounds paranoid, but assume everything is paid promotion. For everything, especially if you catch an emotional flare, ask: Is it profitable for somebody to show me this? This question basically explains social media outrage culture. It also extends to published science. New research downplaying the impact of carbon emissions? Yup, probably funded by oil corporations1. Article claims that increased saturated fat intake isn’t that bad? Looks like lots of funding from dairy and meat companies2.
The next book on my list is Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, which should also address these points more thoroughly.
If you’re looking for a book to thoroughly convince you to quit social media, this might not be the one. The book doesn’t seem to aim to convince people that social media is bad. It only fleshes out existing misgivings for people that are already most of the way to quitting. It might be useful for bite-sized pieces of information to bring up when criticizing social media and some understanding of how social media affects social dynamics. But if you want understanding that motivates change, maybe a different set of readings will help more.
A Q&A with Geoffrey Supran, a research fellow in the History of Science Department at Harvard, describes how oil companies fund both standard climate change denial work and deliver propaganda through advertisement. Read more. ↩
An admittedly very lazy search of PubMed using the term “dairy for children” brought me to an article titled “Saturated Fats and Health: A Reassessment and Proposal for Food-Based Recommendations”, essentially combatting new dietary guidelines recommending restricting saturated fat intake. A cursory glance of the funding section reveals money from various dairy and beef organizations. Read more. ↩
For each resolution, I’ll briefly outline the details and subgoals and also explain why I chose the resolution.
I started blogging in December, but on recommendation from my friend1, I transitioned from GitHub pages to Ghost today. Personally, I want to move back to GitHub pages, but I’ll try Ghost for at least two months. Most posts will be cross-posted on my GitHub site (open here).
For January and February, I want to aim for an average output of two posts per week (“average” because I will be offline for a week in January). I don’t expect this to be successful; my realistic estimate is five posts before March.
My motivation to start a blog mostly came from Alexey Guzey2. Guzey states that “writing helps you think better”, which I agree with based on my experience with essays. Arguments that seemed clear in outlines required more support. Verbally pitching ideas also helps with better thinking, though writing has the added benefit of requiring more thorough source management.
I’ll be light on explaining these because they seem fairly well known. Though I might report on whether anything helps later
Enjoyment of social media has turned to resentment. (Pinterest is still fine, because it’s been the most helpful source for helping with illustration and graphic design).
I’m avoiding concrete sub-resolutions until I better understand why social media can be useful. Many very responsible people, like my PI Megan Murray and the head of the CDC CFA Marc Lipsitch, have Twitter accounts. People who I consider “probably good at thinking”, like those in effective altruism or the rationality community, also enjoy an active Twitter community. Then again, many don’t.
The first step is reading Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier.
Over winter break, even after getting 9-10 hours of sleep per night, I still don’t feel alert.
First, I’ll try and shift my schedule to sleeping during dark hours. As part of this I’ll be shifting electronics usage to stop before 1 AM.
I keep losing track of emails and things I need to do. I’ve shifted toward an Obsidian daily task list, but I still need to build the habit of updating it. Not clearing my inbox also makes this difficult.
I don’t know if this counts as “spring cleaning” or a New Year’s resolution, but before commencement, I need to pare down my stuff to fit into a single car. When Harvard forced all students to move out in Spring 2020, my items (uncomfortably) fit into a Honda Pilot. I have noticeably more things, so I’ll have to KonMari my way through it. I somehow doubt everything in my room “sparks joy”.
Last fall, I took PHIL34: Existentialism in Film and Literature and GENED1069: Faith and Authenticity. In conversations since, I’ve been able to see new connections because of the readings (for example, I have a post in mind parsing through my understanding of Sartre’s “bad faith” and how it applies to social media). Apparently, I forgot that reading philosophy could be good for you.
Some authors I’m interested in are Cornel West, Derek Parfit, and Michel Foucault. Since Cornel West is probably more readable, I’ll start there and trace his influences.
When I get back to school, I’ll read a collection of essays on anarchism that I picked up at Gray Matter Books in New Haven.
For blogging, I’m going to set up some system of accountability with my aforementioned friend. This is the only resolution I really care about. An interesting positive punishment system would be donating to a disliked organization if we fail to meet specified goals.
I prefer doing resolutions in sequence, to give me more time to plan, so no accountability for the others yet. For reading Lanier’s book, I’ll set up some annoying reminder in the last week of winter break, though.
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