 The American psychologist B.F. Skinner became notorious for his Skinner boxes which were a kind of animal experimentation at least in terms of animal behavior What he would do is take mice or other animals and put them in these kind of boxes with different mechanisms on the inside there would be lights levers Switch plates and other kind of things and what he would do is program the boxes in such a way that if the mice stood on a lever or Pulled something at a certain time maybe when a light came on or something else They might receive a reward they might get food pellets or they might get an electric shock or something else The experiments varied and they continued for years and years But the idea of a Skinner's box is that you can leave an animal in a box by itself you don't have to actually Train it or program it to do this or that or the other you can actually just design a box that trains it autonomously So you can leave a mouse in a box overnight come back And he will have a very complex set of behaviors that you design beforehand with your experiment This is what's called operant conditioning sometimes these are called operant conditioning boxes or something else like that and they were very controversial because Skinner was part of behaviorism and behaviorists really viewed it as being totally unscientific to even think about Psychological traits as being Scientifically real or at least objective you can't necessarily ask someone about what they think about this that or the other You really can only look at behavior. That's the only true way you can do science and although he did many of these experiments with Animals and stuff like that the primary direction of all of these experiments was use on humans Skinner actually wrote a book called Beyond Freedom and Dignity Which is sort of a controversial title I guess but it explains his way of looking at the world His vision was to create a behaviorist utopia where all human behavior is Conditioned from stimulus and response similar to these Skinner's boxes So for example humans they do good social things by getting reinforced for doing those things and they're punished If they do something undesirable Skinner ultimately believed as the title suggests that freedom and dignity are Just sort of abstractions. They're spooks. They're metaphysical They're not really the goal of anything in human society and a social engineer can come and design the society for us and Ultimately the train people to behave in the way that they expect This is one of the things that made Skinner and other behaviorists so scientific They really thought of even looking at the psychological traits of mankind. It's just being pseudo science anyway This is relevant for us because we now live in a world of Skinner boxes That is specifically I'm thinking of social media Social media is social control Every single social media site be that Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or anything else They are giant Skinner boxes now that doesn't mean that Skinner or whoever the programmer is Constantly looking over your shoulder and telling you what to do or think but they are Ways of getting reinforcement for particular behavior now originally when these platforms started they sort of had the veneer of being open and anyone could say whatever and There was the idea that there would be emergent consensus from everyone. It's sort of a Decentralized I guess bottom-up process where people develop a culture for a site as time goes on But as time actually went on that is not what happened the people in control of these sites Realized that they could play Skinner they could play the social engineer And so what has happened is that you can actually put just the teensy tiny bit of work into a social media site and make it a Skinner box make it a giant social experiment where you can program millions and billions of people with very little effort Social control actually takes very little effort in social media. It's self-regulating You can actually have the people in the social media treat each other in such a way that reinforces the behavior you want Now at a basic level you can do things like banning now You don't have to ban a large number of people you just have to ban enough people to create a kind of chilling effect You have to put in place Ambiguous terms of service which all of these social media companies do if you get a post banned on You know YouTube or Twitter. You're usually never even told what it's explicitly banned for you're just said Oh, well, it's just said oh well this went against our community standards So we had to delete it So people are banned for different reasons and they're left guessing what those reasons are and There's a chilling effect in terms of people are constantly afraid of getting kicked off these platforms and Over time what this causes is a kind of giant mass lobotomy You are telling people what they can and can't think you're telling that there are certain things that are forbidden And once you do that you can actually expect that those people who are left are going to be Reinforcing themselves in the proper behavior that you want They will give each other likes and comments Only in those places that you you know gradually incentivize them to do you can decide what hashtags go big You can decide what videos go big and although you're not micromanaging every channel Which is something you could do but although you're not doing that You can actually have a large degree of control behavioral control over people and the best part is they think it's them making the decision They think it's oh well, you know, I learned this on social media. This is what's pot This is what other people think this must be the right thing I don't know that much about it But I'm gonna go along with it because this is the consensus that I see emerging when in reality a lot of these Consensuses are just contrived there have actually been a lot of You know studies you can look out here and even like news articles on this I remember a while back there was an article in Forbes about this guy who did the Articles saying oh well I just paid 200 bucks for people on the internet to Bought a couple reddit posts and it's very easy to make things go viral in the right Circumstance if you just have just a little bit of money or just a little bit of motivation and All the rest of the snowballing effect happens naturally in these kind of operant conditioning Environments like people want to see particular things They judge things based on whether they're popular or not and this is the case in of course every social media site But there are some social media sites like reddit where everything is Consent-based everything is social engineering based so you can actually do you can have a lot of control over people's thoughts Just by regulating in very specific areas now Of course, none of this is old-fashioned stuff because B. F. Skinner talked about it a hundred years ago B. F. Skinner actually has a pretty low reputation because you know, he said things very bluntly Obviously beyond freedom and dignity. That's a scary thing. But today. We actually have exactly exactly the same thing There is a viewpoint called libertarian paternalism out there It's popularized primarily by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein Cass Sunstein was actually part of the Obama administration He was I think office of information and regulatory affairs or something like that But they have this viewpoint libertarian paternalism. What what is that supposed to mean? Well, it really is a kind of skin Skinner's box at a massive scale The idea being is that people will want to go along with what you want them to do if you make them believe That that is their decision that is you have all the decisions that someone could make All you have to do is nudge them away of the things that you don't want you program them against particular terms You tell them that that's not a good idea or sometimes you just make things difficult and make other things easy And you can actually have people making the decisions that you want them to make as a social engineer without even You know forcing them to do anything a lot of people think totalitarianism is The government telling you what to think that's never been how it is. That's never been how it is anywhere What's a far better method of control is? Presenting different choices to someone but present them in a biased way that nudges them in a way that you might like So when they make that decision they have the illusion that the decision is there. That's libertarian paternalism It's basically equivalent to totalitarianism and all of this I guess in the the psychology literature is based on what's called the heuristics and biases program This is a program. I guess a psychological approach that's usually associated with to Israeli-American Psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Tversky's not around anymore. He died But Daniel Kahneman is and they popularized this idea that Human cognition itself humans can't even think for themselves like they don't they have cognitive glitches. They have cognitive Breaks in their brain that need fixing by social engineers or maybe just better thinking and it's the obligation of the libertarian paternal Government to push people in such a way that they make the decisions that they want now I've actually talked about this viewpoint before the heuristics and biases viewpoint the idea that human psychology is broken I think you can read other people on this Gerd Gigerrenzer is someone I often recommend because he he makes the argument And I think this is a good one that really these biases are illusions in the first place It's mostly just these researchers who don't understand human behavior in the environment in the experimental environments They put it in that there's a so the so-called ecological rationality approach, which I usually endorse But regardless this is the viewpoint of the social engineers This is the viewpoint of most academics human psychology is broken and we have to control it in some way We have to nudge people in a particular direction It's too condescending to just tell them what to think but we can use social media companies We can use the media. We don't have to massively control everything just Get rid of particular things that people shouldn't be thinking that we don't want them to think and Incentivize them for doing other things and to create a kind of token economy token economy I don't know if Skinner originally used this term, but it's the idea that people get incentivized for good behavior You know maybe to get in some kind of I don't know in some kind of weird camp or mental home You get incentivized for particular behavior you get credits, but that's exactly what we already have in social media We have likes and shares and all of this kind of stuff all of it Is the same kind of social control that purports to be something that is something you're creating It's actually not you think that it's yours, but it isn't so I think a lot of people when they talk about social media Their gut reaction is to say oh well, you know, I'm worried about Facebook because of privacy Okay, now people will willingly give all of their private information to pretty much whoever that's not it I think that that's missing the mark privacy itself is not the concern What the real concern is is that your behavior on social media that is being taken as meta data and of course The people who are making these decisions might not even know who you are But that meta data is being used to create new AI's for really cognitive control Control of you on these social media platforms. They have new ways of automatic flagging They're finding new ways to you know go into buzzwords to you know trigger different Hashtags or you know make different recommendations to people all of this is a behavioral system It's all Reinforcing the behavior that the people in control of the system want that is you know And it's not even to say that they are actively conspiring to do this This is something that will happen if you have a kind of Skinner's box Even if you know, they just think they're doing it for you know, their own good or someone else is good Or just because they think it's right. This is something that happens now at the end of it I think there's something very funny that you know, you often hear in the media nowadays Especially in social media about we need to be worried about radicalization. Oh people are becoming radicalized against the system In reality, it's just the opposite as someone, you know, I have never really used social media My whole life. I've never had a Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or anything else like that And as someone outside of that system, it drives you crazy to see that it's really the people in that system Who are becoming radicalized year in year out their behavior is more Erratic but still predictable and controlled and they're getting to a point where they can be made to believe anything Because they're being convinced that so many things are new consensus and they have to go along with it So it's really the people who are in these systems who are radicalized Everyone else is just staying put and wondering what's going on to the world around them But these social media companies and social media sites even if they're controlled by beneficent people They're not but even if they were They are skinners boxes They are Programming you in the same way that a mouse is being programmed to step on a lever or you know Some kind of stimulus response system It's the exact same thing and in fact it's arguably even worse with humans because we're a lot smarter like when we when we are being Programmed against something or for something or we're being Disincentivized to use these words or you know, we want you know all these kind of things we can rationalize it in our brain we can try and make sense out of it and humans are very good at You know pretending that an idea is their own pretending it Pretending that everything is fine and this is their own decision and this is where this all comes from So anyway, people are a lot more suggestive than they think but either way that's my issue with social media and social control