Thoughts on Lex Fridman's interview with Mark Zuckerberg

Another underwhelming interview by Lex Fridman

I was looking forward to Lex Fridman’s interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I have never heard Mark talk at length. My entire impression of him was from often hostile article articles/comments and the movie The Social Network.

I was critical of Lex’s podcast with Pfizer CEO but interviewing a tech CEO seemed to be more in Lex’s wheelhouse, so I was optimistic. However after listening to the whole thing I felt Lex dropped the ball on several occasions and we missed out on what could have been a great interview.

Can you steel man that for me?

On two occasions Lex’s question consisted of Lex bringing up a topic of criticism and asking Mark to steel man that criticism and respond. Here’s the lead-up to the question relating to the film Social Dilemma.

[Lex] But let me ask some difficult questions now. "Social Dilemma" is a popular documentary that raised concerns about the effects of social media and society. You responded with a point-by. point-rebuttal titled, "What the Social Dilemma Gets Wrong." People should read that. I would say the key point they make is because social media is funded by ads. Algorithms want to maximize attention and engagement and an effective way to do so, is to get people angry at each other, increase division, and so on. Can you Steel Man their criticisms and arguments that they make in the documentary as a way to understand the concern, and as a way to respond to it?

Asking someone to steel man an argument could be useful to show that the person has a good-faith understanding of the criticism, but this just struck me as lazy. The lead up was also a very shallow criticism. Facebook wants to increase engagement, as does any other business. What the harm in that?

As you would expect, Mark doesn’t really steel man the argument. He couldn’t really because Lex’s description was so banal. Mark responds that even if Facebook were only focused on engagement, which they’re not, outrage does not maximize long term engagement.

This side steps the question of why Facebook content is what it is. I can believe that they’re not necessarily optimizing for it, but Facebook content is often divisive, which begs the question, why?

Here’s another question Lex asked Mark to steel man. It was about about Instagram being toxic for young girls:

[Lex] So Instagram is quote "toxic for them." Your response titled, "What. our research really says "about teen wellbeing?" And Instagram says, no. Instagram research shows that. 11 of 12 wellbeing issues, teenage girls, who said they struggle with those difficult issues. Also said that Instagram made them better rather than worse. Again, can you Steel Man and defend the point?

Lex is nice enough to give Mark a rebuttal right in the question, which Mark dutifully repeats.

Hiding behind research

Mark tends to hide behind research. I don’t know the research and I believe Facebook does care about the impact they’re having on young people and society. Mark brings this up as well.

But I don’t believe the research. Some of it doesn’t pass the sniff test. I don’t need research to tell me that young girls looking at celebrities on Instagram selling overpriced makeup is not good for their happiness and body image.

The question is whether you’d allow your daughter on Instagram and at what age. Many tech executives limit the technology their children are exposed to. They don’t need research telling them their child mindlessly swiping past thirst traps on Instgram for hours is bad. I wish Lex asked him what his policies on social media and his children are.

Another time Mark points to research is regarding political polarization:

[Mark] …did a study that basically showed that if you looked after the 2016 Election in the U.S., the voters who were the most polarized were actually the ones who were not on the internet.

Sure, I can imagine a world in which the most politically polarized people were living in a bunker somewhere cut off from the internet. But that doesn’t answer the question “does social media drive political polarization?”

Mark also talks about cable news providers that drive division as well, and maybe they do. But the over-politicization of everything isn’t necessarily about intensity. To me its more about breadth and reach. Maybe the most politically divided people are cable news watchers. But now pretty much everyone is politically divided. This is obvious when you look at falling marriage rates between democrats and republicans. Some people would claim to oppose their children from marrying someone from [wrong political party].

Maybe social media isn’t the absolute worst in terms of dividing people, but its ubiquity makes everything political and fuels outrage culture.

2016

This was a fascinating exchange:

[Mark] And I think what happened, people sort of woke up after 2016, and a lot of people are like, okay, this, the country's a lot more polarized and there's a lot more stuff here than we realized. Why weren't these internet companies on top of this? And I think at that point, it was reasonable feedback that some of this technology had started becoming possible. And at that point, I really did feel like we needed to make a substantially larger investment. We'd already worked on. this stuff a lot, on AI, and on these integrity problems, but that we should basically invest, have a thousand or more engineers basically work on building these AI. systems to be able to go and proactively identify this stuff across all these different areas.

What happened in 2016? Why doesn’t Lex follow up on that point?

Just kidding. Of course everyone knows 2016 is code for “the wrong president was elected”. I wish people would just stop talking in code. Let’s remove the coded language and rephrase this clearly: the wrong president was elected so people asked why didn’t internet companies stop him from being elected? And I think at that point it was reasonable feedback

Again I wish Lex would push back and ask him to clarify what he believes is the appropriate role of social media on elections and democracy.

Final thoughts

There’s a lot more I can say about the interview. Mark talks a lot about AI being a panacea for all issues in social media. He believes they solved the hard questions about appropriate role of social media and rules of conduct, and now its just about enforcement. I would like someone to question that concept and ask him not about enforcement, but the rules.

I loved that Lex started the interview by asking Mark to solve a captcha. I also really enjoyed Mark talking about VR. He obviously put a lot of thought into the topic. I was overall impressed by his depth and passion on the topic.

I came away with a more positive impression of Mark. It wasn’t the interview I wanted, but it was something. Mark seemed relateable and showed a great deal of care about his product and its impact on society. Obviously I disagree with him on a number of topics, but overall he struck me as reasonable.