BRS Carl Bergstrom - Information foraging in a social media world

Share link: https://ubc.zoom.us/rec/share/6E0aPZYMfJN83mHt70sX_eiJKTg0rVSq2vlpPigdbs0yCG8y4kt9JILLeLr5UE4.LGVWvsvy6wpFje1Z

Passcode: Rpy9+2=9 

host: Sally Otto

Title talk: Information foraging in a social media world

Abstract: 
We are a species of information foragers. Individually and collectively, we have evolved to scour our natural and social environments for useful information. Over the past thirty years, society has fashioned the web into an information pipeline to satisfy and profit from our evolved desires for novel information and social connection. What happens when the scale of human communication is radically transformed in the span of the generation, and our mechanisms for creating collective understanding are upended? What happens when this entire process is not stewarded to promote the spread of accurate information, strengthen democracy, and advance human well-being—but rather is engineered by machine learning algorithms to get people to click on advertisements? What happens when large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude enter this global conversation with massive volumes of customized text indistinguishable from that produced by humans?
In this talk, I’ll look at what social media and information technology more generally are doing to society, consider how we ended up here, and explore some possible suggestions for what we can do about it.

Short biography:
I am a Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. Though trained in evolutionary biology and mathematical population genetics, I enjoy working across disciplines and integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences.
The unifying theme running throughout my work is the concept of information. Within biology, I study how communication evolves and how the process of evolution encodes information in genomes. In the philosophy and sociology of science, I study how norms and institutions influence scholars’ research strategies and, in turn, our scientific understanding of the world. Within informatics, I study how citations and other traces of scholarly activity can be used to better navigate the overwhelming volume of scholarly literature. Lately I've become concerned with the spread of disinformation on social networks, and interested in figuring out what we can do about it.