Reproduce “Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance” on OpenResearch
Turn your favorite coding agents into research agents that review literature, develop hypotheses, and run experiments.
Universal app for Apple silicon and Intel. Requires macOS 11 or later.
About this paper
Aviv Ovadya, Luke Thorburn
Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn propose a formal, interdisciplinary framework for "bridging systems" to counter destructive societal divisiveness by fostering mutual understanding and trust. Their work outlines how attention allocation systems can be redesigned to optimize for "bridging-based ranking" rather than solely engagement.
Key insights
- Destructive divisiveness is often an emergent property of existing attention allocation mechanisms optimizing for engagement, rather than an inherent quality of human interaction.
- Bridging aims not to eliminate conflict but to transform it into productive engagement, supporting pluralism by fostering mutual understanding and reducing "perception gaps."
- Bridging can be systematically integrated into algorithmic objective functions by identifying and weighting specific signals, shifting platforms toward pro-social outcomes without necessarily sacrificing financial viability.
Summary by alphaXiv.
Tip: change arxiv.org to autoarxiv.org in any arXiv abstract link to open the paper here.