Do you think people are better off overall than otherwise because of Facebook (and social media generally)? You may have made important connections on Facebook, but many people probably invest less in each connection and have shallower relationships because of social media, and my guess is that mental health is generally worse because of social media (I think there was an RCT on getting people to quit social media, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were multiple studies. I don’t have them offhand). I’d guess social media is basically addictive for a lot of people, so people often aren’t making well-informed decisions about how much to use, and it’s easy for it to be net negative despite widespread use. People joining social media pressures others to join, too, making it more costly to not be on it, so FB creates a problem (induces fear of missing out) and offers a solution to it. Cancel culture, bubbles/echo chambers, the spread of misinformation, and polarization may also be aggravated by social media.
That being said, maybe FB was really important for the growth of the EA community. I mostly got into EA through FB initially, although it’s not where I was first exposed to EA. If we think the EA community is important enough, then this plausibly dominates. And, of course, it’s where Open Phil’s funding came from, but that seems to be historical luck, not really anything special about Facebook, except the growth of its market cap.
On the other hand, FB accelerated the development of AI capabilities, e.g. PyTorch was primarily built by FB. But maybe we should also consider this to be only weakly related to FB’s role in social media, and more related to the fact that it’s just a large tech company.
There are also multiple counterfactuals we could consider: no Facebook + people spend less time on social media, and no Facebook + people spend about as much time on social media (possibly on one similar to FB, or whatever other options there are now). In the first case, I think it’s hard to make a balanced argument for FB being robustly net positive. In the second case, the impact is closer to 0, from either direction, and it’s harder to evaluate its sign. Then there’s the counterfactual impact of FB getting a more productive hire, or one who is otherwise more valued by FB.
I think McKinsey and Goldman would have other firms step into their spaces if they weren’t around.
Do you think people are better off overall than otherwise because of Facebook (and social media generally)? You may have made important connections on Facebook, but many people probably invest less in each connection and have shallower relationships because of social media, and my guess is that mental health is generally worse because of social media (I think there was an RCT on getting people to quit social media, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were multiple studies. I don’t have them offhand). I’d guess social media is basically addictive for a lot of people, so people often aren’t making well-informed decisions about how much to use, and it’s easy for it to be net negative despite widespread use. People joining social media pressures others to join, too, making it more costly to not be on it, so FB creates a problem (induces fear of missing out) and offers a solution to it. Cancel culture, bubbles/echo chambers, the spread of misinformation, and polarization may also be aggravated by social media.
That being said, maybe FB was really important for the growth of the EA community. I mostly got into EA through FB initially, although it’s not where I was first exposed to EA. If we think the EA community is important enough, then this plausibly dominates. And, of course, it’s where Open Phil’s funding came from, but that seems to be historical luck, not really anything special about Facebook, except the growth of its market cap.
On the other hand, FB accelerated the development of AI capabilities, e.g. PyTorch was primarily built by FB. But maybe we should also consider this to be only weakly related to FB’s role in social media, and more related to the fact that it’s just a large tech company.
There are also multiple counterfactuals we could consider: no Facebook + people spend less time on social media, and no Facebook + people spend about as much time on social media (possibly on one similar to FB, or whatever other options there are now). In the first case, I think it’s hard to make a balanced argument for FB being robustly net positive. In the second case, the impact is closer to 0, from either direction, and it’s harder to evaluate its sign. Then there’s the counterfactual impact of FB getting a more productive hire, or one who is otherwise more valued by FB.
I think McKinsey and Goldman would have other firms step into their spaces if they weren’t around.