team dynamics

"You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”. Dennis Hightower, who at the time was head of Disney International.

He asked me why I wasn’t doing something, and I responded by explaining the pros and cons of two different ways of doing it. Thoughtfully, he replied “You know, there are 13 ways of doing anything. 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it.”

The best Founders avoid over-analyzing. At a startup, you don’t have time — and the result will most likely be marginal. Pick a way and do it. Be consistently decisive.

How does "Anderson v TikTok/ByteDance" relate to UpTrust? (continued from the Uptrust slack)

Links:

• https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judges-rule-big-techs-free-ride-on
• Hacker News discussion

This stuff was hard for me to make sense of. I think writing about it here has helped.

The Moody v NetChoice case mentioned in The Big Newsletter is about NetChoice (Facebook, Google, etc.) in reaction to recent laws passed by Florida and Texas. NetChoice claims that content moderation is their right according to the US constitution’s First Amendment

https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-supreme-court-weigh-state-laws-constraining-social-media-companies-2023-09-29/

The Florida law calls for consistent censorship standards on a platform, allowing opt-out of recommendation systems in favour of objective sorting methods, equal opportunity for political candidates and news sources, disclosure of censorship methods and events, and offboarding for censored users. The Texas law prohibits social media companies from censoring users based on their viewpoint (while allowing for removal of illegal content), and requires disclosure of how the platform’s recommendation and moderation systems work, as well as providing reasoning and an appeals process for censored users.

Next is Anderson v TikTok/ByteDance, the main subject of the The Big Newsletter article. The case was escalated to the US Supreme Court after being dismissed from the District Court. The District Court claimed that the Communications Decency Act, section 230 immunised TikTok. The actual Supreme Court document was surprisingly easy to follow (given that I have no background in law), and it felt like a good overview of the history of this kind of problem.

Here’s my understanding of what they wrote. The ideas behind Section 230 are:

• A company isn’t considered the author of some content merely due to having hosted it.

  For example, if someone uploads a copyrighted work to a file-sharing site, then only the uploader has violated copyright, not the file-sharing company.

  Here’s a case where I think this played out reasonably: someone tried to sue some bookstores (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.) for defamation because the bookstores had defamatory content as part of the book’s description on its store page. The defamation claim against the bookstores was dismissed because they were not the ones making the claim; it was copy provided to them by the book’s publisher. Only the publisher and the author remained liable.

• A companies with some kind of content moderation policy / screening process is not necessarily liable for all content.

  For example, a family-friendly bulletin board that proactively excludes obscene submissions shouldn’t be liable for defamatory content on the grounds that it has some screening process for submissions.

TikTok tried to argue that its recommendation system is merely an extension of hosting videos, so it shouldn’t be liable for the harm caused by those videos.
The court dismissed this argument:

I would affirm the District Court’s judgment as it relates to any of Anderson’s claims that seek to hold TikTok liable for the Blackout Challenge videos’ mere existence on TikTok’s platform. But I would reverse the District Court’s judgment as it relates to any of Anderson’s claims that seek to hold TikTok liable for its knowing distribution and targeted recommendation of the Blackout Challenge videos.

I think it’s reasonable to hold TikTok accountable for the impact of its highly personalised, virality-biased recommendation system.

Seeing all of this, I’m optimistic for how UpTrust could fit into the legal landscape.
Giving users agency over their content curation means that UpTrust doesn’t need to censor based on viewpoint.
I think transparency regarding recommendation systems and moderation decisions fit in our collective values, and to me they seem like a good thing regardless of whether they’re legislated.

And when it comes to the potential for harm that’s facilitated by the platform, like a recommendation system spreading a self-asphyxiation meme that kids copy and kill themselves, I think it’s reasonable for such a risk to exist. We don’t need to be immune to liability in order to build the thing, and perhaps the risk will help us think about how to make a safer system. Like, if UpTrust did well because 80% of the activity was a child-abuse ring, then it’s kind of okay if the company got nuked or had to make significant reparations. So let’s do our best to make sure we create something that’s good for people, and be willing to kill it if we find out it’s not.

The Relateful Company should embrace more job titles. We’re under-appreciating orange.

We’ve included the green critiques, like the classic:

What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so - V. F. Ridgway, 1956

But we need to embrace more healthy competition, striving for excellence, even rankings.

one way we can do this is to make more liberal use of titles, and brag on people. @Valerie Daniel is the MANAGING DIRECTOR, and we should have her listed as such in emails and things

What else is healthy orange and how can we transclude it?
What do we already do that is already healthy orange?

The Relateful Company should embrace more job titles. We’re under-appreciating orange.

We’ve included the green critiques, like the classic:

What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so - V. F. Ridgway, 1956

But we need to embrace more healthy competition, striving for excellence, even rankings.

one way we can do this is to make more liberal use of titles, and brag on people. @Valerie Daniel is the MANAGING DIRECTOR, and we should have her listed as such in emails and things

What else is healthy orange and how can we transclude it?
What do we already do that is already healthy orange?

Being Out of Sync in a Group Meeting. I was just in a meeting that I was leading where, almost every time I spoke, someone else spoke at the same time. The other person would continue speaking and I would stop. It was as if my timing was wrong; I was out of sync with the group. I imagine there were a number of things going on. One is that I was holding the list of topics to talk about as if we needed to get through all of them in the time we had, while the group wanted to savor and speak to each item at length. But it wasn’t just that. Within a topic, I was always bumping against someone else, timing wise. It felt awful. Any ideas or comments about this phenomena?

Who should date me? I get really pumped about what can be possible for online dating in UpTrust.

For example, someone having high current trust scores from a majority of his exes.

Or me going through all my single friends who are the gender I date and posting on their Dating Recommendations tree posts like I adore him as a friend and would totally want to date him if we wanted the same lifestyle! He gives the best hugs and is someone whose opinion I value highly when I make major decisions. I’d like to see him with a woman who embraces spirituality and likes throwing Superbowl parties.

So here’s my personal test-drive. Feel free to populate this tree with your opinions on my dating life, recommendations, questions, etc. <3

Patience, aka fractal Forming Storming Norming Performing. Yesterday I was in a circle where someone said something like, Okay, I’m learning that what I shared (10 minutes ago or something) created more distance and division in the group, and that’s not what I want. I could totally see where they were coming from, with the immediate reactions they got. Meanwhile, looking around, it really looked to me like we were much closer as a group than we’d been before that share and the resulting reactions and etc. It reminded me that sometimes it takes patience to see the impacts we’re having on each other, and if we judge too quickly (as I know I’ve done countless times in my life), we’ll miss out on the beauty we help create when we bring truth and love.

Forming Storming Norming Performing–it’s kinda happening a little bit all the time fractally or something. I imagine there’s a better description of it than that, but that’s one way of pointing to what I mean.