By Xu Lun, F(X)Team, Ali Tao Department
On August 27, 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a notice soliciting public comments on the Draft Regulations on The Management of Internet Information Service Algorithm Recommendation. Article 15 of it provides that:
Algorithmic recommendation service providers should provide users with options that are not specific to their personal characteristics, or provide users with convenient options to turn off algorithmic recommendation services. If the user chooses to close the algorithm recommendation service, the algorithm recommendation service provider shall immediately stop providing relevant services. Algorithmic recommendation service providers should provide users with the ability to select, modify or delete user labels used for algorithmic recommendation services.
This once again triggered people’s thinking about the nature of recommendation algorithms from the national level.
“Information cocoon room” debate
Information Cocoon is a concept proposed by Harvard University professor Cass R. Sunstein in his book Infotopia published in 2006. This concept means:
When individuals focus only on what they choose or what pleases them, and reduce their exposure to other information, they will, like silkworms, gradually become imprisoned in the “cocoon” of self-weaving.
When the concept was first proposed, it quickly became a sensation. Both the support and opposition voices are endless, and this topic was even written into the Language composition of the 2020 College entrance examination in Jiangsu Province:
Write an essay of at least 800 words based on the following information. In addition to poetry, style is optional. Simultaneous answer, concord. People always focus on the people and things they love, and over time, they will be surrounded and shaped by similar information. In the era of intelligent Internet, this kind of surround is more closely, and this kind of shaping is more sensible. Your future might start with the next spontaneous web browsing, a sympathetic “like”, an involuntary sharing, a sudden emotional sensation.
Against the cocoon of information theorists, for example, there are articles that attribute such thinking to a human fear of technology. For example, it says:
Information bias is human nature, even in the age of traditional media, when we read newspapers, we just pick and choose the articles we are interested in. To some extent, algorithmic recommendations simply facilitate this selection process. Therefore, “information cocoon room” is just an untenable “false concept”, or a “speculation”.
If this logic holds, we can say that because we like food that is high in oil, high in calories and high in sugar, our canteen should serve only these foods.
According to Nietzsche, the essence of life is the pursuit of will to power. However, human beings also have weaknesses and can suppress their will to power through some means. Such as hypnosis, mechanical repetitive activities, micro-pleasures, group identification, over-development of certain emotions, etc.
Religion has done all this, bringing the West through the Middle Ages for thousands of years. Today’s online games can also do many of these points, we can not say that because religion was such a suppression of human nature, so online games do good.
What do existing recommendation algorithms bring to people
In 1775, Patrick Henry, one of the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, famously declared “Give me liberty or Give me death” in a speech at the Virginia Convention.
Sinking into a normal state
So is man free? When a person is born, he or she does not have the right to choose his or her own gender, parents, nationality, family, or country. In Heidegger’s words, a person is “thrown” into the world. After birth, human beings cannot live independently of other people, even when they are young and still when they grow up. In order to live with others, we have to be influenced by others. One is always at work in one situation or another. Our environment is like a net that traps us. Communication with others, books, newspapers, radio, television, and information on the Internet also constantly influence our thinking. Recommendation algorithms for advertising, media, and e-commerce services are part of this web of enhanced capabilities. Heidegger called the state of being greatly influenced by others and lacking self-reflection “ordinary people”. The state in which people are in a “normal” state without knowing it is called “perdition” by Heidegger.
The most basic recommendation algorithm is called collaborative filtering. It is divided into collaborative filtering based on goods, that is, if you buy goods A, you will recommend similar goods B to you; And user-based collaborative filtering, that is to say, you and your friend C have similar preferences, and he buys product D, so he will also recommend product D to you. For example, if you buy shin Ramen, recommend similar Korean Turkey noodles. For example, you and Mr. Rehm have similar preferences. You both like to drink Coke. Now I find that Mr. Rehm likes eating hot pot, so I recommend you to eat hot pot too.
To make the principle more complicated, for example, we can write the following formula:
But no matter how complex the representation, essentially what recommendation algorithms do is part of a larger web, allowing people to get bogged down in calculations of their own or others’ interest.
Curiosity and emptiness
Seeing the above conclusion, some students think it is wrong. Those of you who have studied algorithms know BandIt, which is a balance between exploitation and exploration. You say I use recommendation algorithm to catch you, I add randomness to you should be ok? Other students believe that people are born with curiosity, curiosity will let us break through the net, find a wider world, break the limit.
So instead of getting philosophical, let’s start with the most common scenario where you swipe your phone. For example, take a day off at home to brush mobile phones, watch short videos, read novels, follow dramas, read gossip news, play mobile games. What do you feel in bed after a day like this if you can’t fall asleep, full or empty? We also meet many people in our life who are curious and know a lot of things, but don’t know anything very well. That’s because curiosity is a powerful tool for exploring the unknown, but curiosity alone isn’t enough. Our default mode is to lose focus and jump quickly from one subject to another. Like the immortal sword in the little poem: “Today, like water without a trace. Ming Xi he Xi, you have stranger “.
French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre believed that the essence of human beings is nothingness. There are an infinite number of possibilities, but it is human nature to seek certainty, not possibility. Humans can acquire a sense of certainty by possessing things, such as buying things, but finite, fixed things cannot fill infinite possibilities. This is also a philosophical explanation that the existing recommendation algorithms cannot meet the needs of human beings.
Finally, because of sink and unwillingness to think independently, people are unwilling to make decisions and bear the consequences of decisions. Recommendation algorithms can help people avoid decisions and continue to sink. It’s certainly not very negative, but it’s not very positive either.
How to break a game?
So, the question is, what’s going to happen? What’s going to happen?
Born to die
The answer is like William in Braveheart. Like Wallace, through thinking, the pursuit of freedom, awakening from the sinking, into a state called “true”.
In our sinking state, we give up our freedom and leave the decisions of our own existence to prevailing opinions and conventions. The original survival condition is not to want to be unconventional, go against popular, that still is the condition of a kind of sink actually. It’s understanding that we are born with freedom to make decisions and choices. Even if you are restricted, even if you have to bear the consequences of your decisions, you are sorry to your conscience. It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that we don’t take responsibility for our own survival by not doing what we could.
So is understanding this truth, we can live a good life? It’s not that easy! You underestimate the power of ordinary people. The great inertia that we are born with is swirling around us, and the possibility of escape is very small.
How much force does it take to fly into space like the first cosmic speed of earth’s satellite? Perhaps it is only at the end of one’s life that one realizes that one can speak well when one is dying. It is at such moments that one truly discovers that he is dying, but that the world in which he has sunk does not die with him. It’s a breakthrough that separates someone from their normal environment. At this moment, people regret not to do things, with other people’s expectations, other people’s opinions and so on finally completely irrelevant, this one, people finally become their own. The individuality and irreplaceability of man was finally removed from the normal state. Can existing recommendation algorithms recommend things that meet the requirements of ontological states? The result of the recommendation itself is separated along with the sink.
So, is there a way to not wait until the last minute to be authentic? American writer Saroyan said: “everyone dies, but I always thought I did not.” This is the normal state of sinking. But if we can face death, truly feel the feeling of impending death, and maintain the fear of death, we may enter the true state. However, knowing the way to enter the true, still can not lead a good life, because the true state may only exist for a moment, you immediately pulled back to the normal state of destruction.
Despite the return to sinfulness, the seeds of conscience are slowly taking root. The more opportunities you have to get out of the rut and reflect on what you really want as an individual.
Of course, there is more than one way to escape from the state of perdition through reflection. For example, to the boundless curiosity of water, to the fear of death, you realize that “there is no ignorance, there is no ignorance, and even there is no old death, and there is no old death. Without suffering, there is no way out. Without wisdom, there is no gain. Then you can also get out of the state of perdition, but not into the state of being, but “from reversing dreams, nirvana.”
Poetry and further away
Some students said, I read your article is to see the thinking of recommendation algorithm, you told me what is the use of living to death, which depends on people’s own thinking and reflection, recommendation algorithm can help? All recommendation and no reflection will always sink in.
Fortunately, in addition to the method of completely breaking away from the sinking and returning to the true, we also open a window to see another world in the sinking. This is the call of poetry, art and nature, which we call “poetry and distance”.
Breaking away from perdition can be regarded as leaving darkness into light, while poetry and distance are like the bright heart in the night sky, which can also bring us no guidance in perdition.
When Heidegger was thinking about sinology, he saw the poem “Man, Poetic Dwelling” by The German poet Holderlin, which had been forgotten for more than 100 years.
If life were nothing but toil, man would look up to heaven and ask: Am I asking for too much to survive? Yes. As long as goodness and innocence were in the company of man, he would cheerfully measure himself against the divinity. Is god unpredictable and unknowable? Is god as clear as the sky? I prefer to believe the latter. This is a human ruler. People are full of hard work, but also poetic settlement on the earth. I really want to prove that even the starry sky is not pure than man, who is called the image of god. Is there a ruler above the earth? Absolutely.
Similarly, as existentialism faded and the New Age movement rose, westerners sought the source of their spiritual longing and found the poetry of Rumi, a Sufi poet from more than 700 years ago. In 2007, UNESCO designated it the International Year of Rumi to mark the 800th anniversary of rumi’s birth.
Like this one:
You’re beautiful and you think you’re the lock on the door but you’re the key to the door. The bad thing is that you want to be someone else and you can’t see your own face, your own beauty no one else has a better face than you. Everything in the universe is within you and look inward for all the answers
Language can reveal existence, but at the same time it can easily obscure existence. When we use a set of customary language, many ideas become ready-made and taken for granted, which makes people sink into destruction and makes existence itself obscured and forgotten. Poetry is about revealing existence, allowing the reader to enter a transparent wormhole.
Like poetry, Heidegger believed that every great work of art lit up a field in the state of chaos and destruction, and also let the viewer into the transparent reality at the same time. I personally believe that nature, as the home of the human heart, also plays a clarifying role.
What about our recommendation algorithm? Is it also able to illuminate a field, clarify a hidden real environment? Let the user in the sink to find the real needs of the true self?
The new recommendation algorithm should have the following characteristics:
- It must be for individual users: it cannot be provided by a merchant, no matter how much the merchant thinks his customer is first, and his customer is not for a specific individual. It involves the interests of too many platforms, large merchants, small merchants, other consumers and developers themselves
- It can be complex: although it represents a specific user, it may be more than a web page, an application, and may require a server or even a cluster dedicated to that individual user
- It is not free: recommendations are no longer a marketing tool for merchants, a cost that is of course borne by individual users themselves
- It is human-machine collaboration: as mentioned earlier, it is not a tool to replace human thinking, but an aid to destruction. People cannot give up their freedom to make their own decisions, and the role of algorithms is to help clarify new fields
- It’s emotional, even spiritual: that’s probably the biggest challenge, how to represent sensibility in numbers. But the question is not whether it is difficult, but whether it is really a question. The good news is that a growing number of pre-training models are offering a glimmer of hope.
Finally, let’s close with a little quote from Rumi:
Don’t worry about your life being turned upside down. How do you know that the past is better than the future? Do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
summary
The algorithm can not only recommend the present indifferent, but also like poetry and the distance as clear a field of cover.