Tensile test

Animating old GenRad testing machines got me thinking in terms of Metrology again.

Social media algorithms are testing machines for the pigeons in the Skinner box. You have a lever marked “block”, which allegedly gets rid of stuff you don’t want. You keep pressing, assuming that the AI algorithm will adapt to your desires. If it adapted, it would figure out the consistent pattern of your simple dislike, and it would stop feeding you stuff similar to what you “block”. Instead, the algorithm feeds you MORE AND MORE of the SAME stuff you want to “block”, until you finally give up and stop pressing the lever.

The algo has now measured the tensile strength of your personality, and it also knows the chemical formula for the solvent that softens your personality.

I gave up on Medium when it displayed this tensile-tester tendency. Now Substack is doing the same thing.

This explains why the Tech Tyrants and their pet “government” want to ban Tiktok. Its algorithm is not supplying the necessary testing data to OUR tyrants. There might be a secondary reason, connected to the basic difference between our cultural colonialism versus China’s purely capitalist approach. Tiktok is helping MANY people in Africa and other parts of the SANE world to have a public voice and run small businesses. In other words, it’s performing the same service as China’s more concrete colonialism, which helps African farmers and miners and manufacturers to improve their business, while providing necessary resources to China.