Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Maybe tangential but I have had the sense for the past ten years that something is wrong with human cognition.

When I look at the popular ideas on all sides of the political spectrum, the trend seems to have been toward ideas that are not only more one dimensional and extreme but more irrational and incoherent. I regularly come across online comments that are borderline word salad, a blathering incoherent mess of the sort that would in the past have immediately led to questions about schizophrenia.

It doesn’t seem to be a specific idea so much as a decline in the lucidity and coherence of cognition itself. The ideas are inane, but I can’t imagine such inane ideas taking hold to such an extent in earlier eras.

I have only two hypotheses that seem like they make sense: gamified social media and CO2 concentration impacting metabolism. I lean strongly toward the former because around 2010 is when algorithmic timelines started to be introduced and it was right around then that I remember a tangible sense of sharp decline. I had to include the latter for completeness, but I hope not as the latter would be far scarier.

Social media companies are the tobacco companies and opiate dealers of the information age. The more I see of them the more I am convinced they are an objective evil and create net negative value. The algorithmic weighting of content for engagement seems to be the real problem, but it’s at the heart of their business model now.

Both your hypotheses are pretty far fetched. Your observations are anecdotal and shouldn't lead to such bold claims.

> I regularly come across online comments that are borderline word salad

If this was an actual trend, which I wouldn't want to assume, don't you think there are simpler explanations to this? I'd immediately come up with two:

- The internet has gotten way more accessible (+ most of the new users aren't native english speaker)

- ML Bots

You can notice such behavior IRL as well.

I agree...it's easy to not notice I think, but I definitely have the same impression that the aggregate mental health of internet users is degrading in various ways. The mind ingests a massive number of variables as it renders reality, we have pretty decent (if primitive) knowledge of the flaws in this device, and the number of changes in the system in the last few decades is substantial...who knows wtf is really going on inside the 7 billion black box reality machines out there! What we know for sure is that there is major malfunctions going on anywhere one looks, and that's only the ones we are able to see.

I think running a similar analysis as this (and other analyses) on the last 10 years of popular mainstream subreddits would yield some interesting results.

Or, perhaps a new meta-social-network of some sort will appear on the scene that can point a portion of our massive biological compute power at the phenomenon and try to gain some understanding of it. I worry that if something isn't done, the system might start falling apart.

The more I see of them the more I am convinced they are an objective evil and create net negative value.

With invoking the words, "absolute evil", you seem to also take part of your observed trend:

When I look at the popular ideas on all sides of the political spectrum, the trend seems to have been toward ideas that are not only more one dimensional and extreme

Heavy metal toxicity is some sort of error. Lead, in particular, is required for glucose transport into axons,the failure of which leads to synapse loss and mental illness.

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