Blog/2026-02-23/The Internet Makes Us Seem Like Peers

We each think the other insane, so the alternative way to handle Shiri's Scissor is to just not talk to the other side

On the Internet, we all interact with each other as roughly equals and that works quite well so long as you're among peers. But because of the flattened social hierarchy, you could be receiving advice from people who are not your peers. Rarely, this is very obvious like when the BBC recommended you smear yogurt on your walls instead of using your air-conditioning or delete emails to save water but most of the time it flies under the radar. I believe that no worthwhile advice comes from incompetence but the incompetence is not always detectable. You see a person on the Internet and they seem sane and normal because you only interact with them over a small sliver of text. The truth is that you've modeled the person based on your peers and then super-imposed the belief they espouse on them. But that's not reality.

Social media's greatest ill might be social hierarchy compression. The problem isn't the filter bubble. Usually, it is the absence of the filter bubble. There are a few classic examples of this on the Internet:

• Toxic gender wars: these are usually started by women in places like Pakistan saying "All men are shit" which I can see as easily being some people's lived experience there, or by some similar person going "All women are sluts" both of which are not true either literally or directionally. But these are clearly broken people from some broken place.

• Employment discussion: all management is always trying to screw you and steal all the credit and they want you in the office because they value butts in seats more than anything. All of this is obviously untrue as a universal characteristic but you're listening to people who had bad experiences. Sometimes when you look into it you find they are in China or India or Poland.

• Standards of living: people in the UK generally don't live as wealthily as Americans. There are a few, but the majority of people are trying to barely make it and they'll say "The Ruling Class Is Exploiting Us" and yeah that may be true for a country with a literal monarchy and a bunch of people called Lords who make up the rules, but when you read that you shouldn't really see that as someone like you telling you something.

In normal life you'd never have this problem. Your social circle is limited by physical presence and that's a good thing unless you're good at selecting among the pandemonium. But social media flattens the graph. You have the Pakistanis giving dating advice among the Indians giving employment advice while the British tell you the thickness of their cooling yogurt smear. And you think to yourself "man, the people out there are bloody weird" but the reality is that you were not meant to see them. They were meant to hang out with each other and you were meant to hang out with your people. Social media should not be a $K_n$ graph.

Reverse Direction

You'll also see this in social media that starts engagement-maxxing, e.g. Twitter. Twitter once upon a time used SimClusters to keep people of similar interests together while exposing overlaps. Pretty cool. But when Elon Musk decided to tune up Twitter's engagement numbers, users noticed that they were being exposed to more and more general-purpose content that stopped being relevant to them. Eventually, with the amount of unrelated outrage nonsense that was making it onto my feed, I decided to stop using Twitter.

Shiri's Scissor

So Elon Musk et al. have created the scissor, but it is actually an ensemble algorithm that works by fusing two groups with opposing views into a single space. By simply finding them and putting them together, you create a machine that produces scissor statements at a high rate.