Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

Comment by supernova87a | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit of a side point, but I don't think the amount of information is causing us trouble. It's the speed of it.

Every day we're being asked (or exposed) to so many new topics (and movements) that our attention has to get divided for minutes at a time amongst so many things.

And what does that lead to? Given so many things to pay attention to, we then have to resort to simplification -- symbols -- to decide what we want or not, what to vote for or against, when there's a world of complication underneath.

We go from symbol to symbol, giving our upvote that causes huge amounts of disruption to the people and issues that have to deal with the day-to-day reality after we've moved on to the next new thing. We gave our vote based on the symbol (which often doesn't turn out to be what we thought it was), with little thought to the consequences in the details.

I think it's a problem, how the speed of information is making life more shallow, yet more complicated and less satisfying.

Interestingly enough, this idea (or at least a variation of it) has been around for quite some time. Alvin Toffler[0] wrote about similar ideas in the late 1960's / early 1970's, and a lot of his thoughts are expressed in his book titled Future Shock[1] - which is also the term he coined for the phenomenon he was describing.

Toffler and his work have been discussed here on HN a few times, but I'd particularly call out this discussion, from the article announcing his death.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004470

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

Also infoglut.

Future Shock has a mixed reputation, but as I've worked my way through it this year (the 50th since its publication), I've been impressed by both its hits and misses.

The cautionary notes seem more enduring than its optimistic ones, and the commentary on cultural shifts and psychology more accurate than those on specific technical or scientific advances. Even Toffler seems to have underappreciated the scope and impact of infotech change, though that's balanced by overoptimism on other technology fronts.

Summing up his successful prognostications generally, they are "unintended consequences and side effects".

Thanks for the link to the obit discussion.

If you like that kind of thing (I do), then you may be interested in A Brief History of the Future, by Jacques Attali, first published in 2006.

Attali was an adviser to the French President and writes in the French obscurantist style, and most of the book is a history of the past, not the future. But...

Attali does talk about the issues of:

everything-as-a-service;

corporate surveillance and hyper-invasive employee behaviour control (think: FB, Goog, MS, your employer with keyloggers etc);

decreasing relevance / capability of leading nation states, especially the US (demonstrated by this little virus thingy);

interregional and inter-ideological conflict (China cyberhacking turned up to 11, climate refugees);

a turning against (crony) capitalism, which has failed for nearly everybody (by externalising costs, and shifting risks onto households). Extinction Rebellion is an early, embryonic example of this, I think.

And he was writing all that back in the early 2000s.

Thanks, new to me though John Naughton's similarly titled book is in my pile.

I'm somewhat more interested in older histories as they have a track record which can be tracked and suggest possible guiding principles (or traps).

Before the age of corona, I was really getting into spending hours in the reference and old books sections of the library and boggling at things like centuries of german language chemistry journals, shelf spanning encyclopedia, 1970 AI journals, tomes upon tomes of outdated education theory books, multiple different complete histories of European art, How-to's for Kite mounted film photography, contact indexes of professionals and society members, compendiums of historical news papers... Thinking all this information is fossilized here, and no-one is ever going to put it to use again, or even have the attention span to sit and read it, let alone the skills synthesize knowledge from it, or the guidance of a community familiar with the the important texts, and authors to navigation to the good bits.. I was very aware of the difference in my mind now, and when i was younger, when I could just sit and be absorbed by a book, without trying to race ahead.

I think we will get around to extracting it but there are a lot of roadblocks to doing anything with it. A lot of it is IP is a complete mess so even if a company or institution did want to digitize it actually making it available is a complete nightmare, it's ok on '23 to '78 works because it's at least a fixed length but on any works printed after that the period is variable so you have to research when every author died. [0]

[0] Not even sure how that works for things like journals or pieces with multiple authors like scientific papers! I imagine for collected works each piece would be under a separate copyright duration?

For what it's worth, people do still enjoy those books sometimes. You did! I spent a lot of time browsing the MIT library for their century-old books on metalworking, aircraft design, electromechanics, and similar topics. A lot of fascinating information is locked up in those pages, in many ways no less useful than what is published today, but much less commonly known.

I did something similar. I would browse my university’s library and come upon all sorts of interesting topics.

I would still do this at a local library near my office. Unfortunately its closed now with appointment only due to covid.

There are so many interesting bits of information sitting in these books. Its almost as if it’s waiting for someone to stitch together a new idea or theory.

Speed is a central tenet of Paul Virilio's work, which might be of interest to you: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/speed-and-politics-new-editio...

Twitter seems to be the worst offender in this regard.

Isn't that the crux of Jean Baudrillard's Simulcara and Simulation? To be honest I've never read the original text, which is not the most accessible, but I've read many overviews and analyses.

When you create a rich enough symbolic system you can detach from what it was intended to symbolize. If the king ordered a map as detailed as possible, as big as the kingdom itself, and dedicated resources to maintaining it, people would start living on the map itself as it becomes less of a map and more of an alternate reality.

The richness of human thought over history is less and less dependent on reality. It will only increase with time.

The speed and amount are tightly coupled - it's not possible to process large amounts of data at a slow speed.

When a lot of the information is correcting or contradicting the information that came before, you could have reduced the amount of data by slowing down.

Sure it is, it just takes longer.

> The speed and amount are tightly coupled - it's not possible to process large amounts of data at a slow speed.

That's true (and much the same thought occurred to me), but there is still a difference between bandwidth and latency, and we use "speed" to talk about both.

Latency in its many forms has (on average) decreased enormously as well, whether we're talking about personal correspondence, fashion trends, research and development, stock trading, political speechifying, or practically anything else.

It's probably easier to distinguish between the two aspects of "speed" through their side effects.

The increased volume of information drives narrowing specialization, for example, while decreased latency increases collaboration.

Economically, you can also think of increasing bandwidth as falling distribution costs, and decreasing latency as falling distribution time[0].

So, yes, increased volume of information means that you have to absorb more of it faster even if nothing else changes, but decreased latency makes you, the human in the loop and the frequency with which you poll your information sources, the only remaining bottleneck. It also makes the dopamine hit of immediate feedback apply to ever broader contexts (thus, gamification).

So we get inane phenomena like "First post!", or two dozen voicemails left before lunch because some horrible event in your city made the national news while you had your phone turned off, or flame wars spiraling out of control over the course of a few hours, and so on.

So, yeah. Information coming at you faster isn't just about the amount of information produced or consumed in a given amount of time, it's also about how quickly you then see others' subsequent reaction/response, and how quickly others can see yours[1].

[0] This is complicated by the fact that even here we're talking about both reduced time-to-publication from automation and dematerialization, as well as the falling cost of speed-of-light distribution, getting it into the hands of people everywhere and anywhere, and into (or replacing) every link in the chain.

[1] "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." definitely applies here, but as elsewhere, isn't necessarily all that helpful.

yes information needs integration which depends on the integration speed of the recipient. let's wait 40 years, future generations will become capable of handling parallel streams of wiki updates without breaking a sweat

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