The Crisis of Human Collective Decision-making in a Social Media World

Описание: (March 4, 2025) 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 twenty 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 a 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 enter this global conversation with massive volumes of customized text indistinguishable from that produced by humans?

In this talk, Prof. Carl T. Bergstrom will 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.

Presented by UCLA Library and the Jacob Marschak Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Mathematics in the Behavioral Sciences.

Speaker: Carl T. Bergstrom | professor in the Dept. of Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle

Carl T. Bergstrom is a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Trained in evolutionary biology, mathematical population genetics and infectious disease epidemiology, Carl is perhaps best known for working across field boundaries and integrating ideas across the span of the natural and social sciences. The unifying theme running through his work is the concept of information. Within biology, he studies problems such as the evolution of communication and how the process of evolution by natural selection creates the information that is encoded in genomes. In philosophy and sociology of science, his work explores how the incentives created by scientific institutions shape scholars’ research strategies and in turn our scientific understanding of the world; in network science, how information and disinformation flows through massive-scale networks. In epidemiology, he played a prominent role during the COVID-19 pandemic as a science communicator and developed models used to implement proactive testing programs worldwide. His work on the evolution of emerging infectious diseases illustrates the value of evolutionary biology in public health and medicine, and the college textbook he coauthored with Lee Dugatkin, Evolution, is now in its third edition with W. W. Norton and Co. Most recently, Carl has teamed up with Jevin West to fight misinformation online by teaching quantitative reasoning and digital literacy. Together, they coauthored Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Digital World (Random House, 2020).