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Comment by spirographer | Hacker News Reader

Brilliant synthesis:

Globally humans have transitioned almost overnight from information/knowledge scarcity to information flood. Once we had plenty of time to forage information to construct narratives and share them and agree/disagree on them before the next influx. Now we are literally waterboarded with information that has no context, minimal sharing and no real conversation attached. We are left with whatever individual narrative our pattern matching can construct, and it's usually inadequate. Narrative is definitely a superpower of the group not the individual.

We may need to wait a generation until people who have grown up in this world and can filter feed on the information can create/disseminate narrative adapted to the new rate of information flow and yet somehow true to reality.

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The situation invites comparisons to the obesity epidemic or perhaps (more of a stretch) the introduction of alcohol into American tribes.

Regardless, it's critical to recognize that we as a people need to develop a greater worldview/metacognition to go any further forward together.

Or, even more pessimistically, the introduction of oxygen into the atmosphere by cyanobacteria in the Great Oxygenation Event.

> it's critical to recognize that we as a people need to develop a greater worldview/metacognition to go any further forward together.

Possibly, but the chances of a move towards a cohesive worldview seem fleeting at best. If anything it seems more likely that we'll continue to fragment further and even more rapidly. We had a chance at this during the pandemic - humanity could have come together to fight a common enemy (the virus) but instead we fractured into groups and fought each other.

This is contrary to the article, you're assuming everyone involved scanned the deluge of information and the only "rational" result would be to come to the same conclusion about an insanely complex situation as you did, whereas the article argues that there's so much information and so many dots that people scan the same wealth of data and come to different conclusions.

Ok, but I think my point still stands: Thinking we'll arrive at a cohesive, shared worldview seems like wishful thinking at this point. Maybe there was a golden age in the post-war period, say in the 70s, when a cohesive, shared world view kind of existed in the US, but we're well past that now.

> We may need to wait a generation until people who have grown up in this world and can filter feed on the information can create/disseminate narrative adapted to the new rate of information flow and yet somehow true to reality.

I'm not so optimistic. Remember when when people thought gen z and gen alpha would be "digital natives?" They were supposed to be tech savvy but a good chunk of them can't use a search engine, or a word processor. A teacher I know says that each year the kids just get stupider and stupider, they sit around all day on social media and their brains haven't developed or something.

It chimes with people in the late C19th / early C20th complaining about the fact they were overloaded by news because newspapers were being published on a weekly and then daily basis.

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