12 karma · joined June 12, 2026
The larger and more complex a project gets cognitive limits get hit whether you use AI or not. Do people then just do what someone else more experienced tells them to do? Yes. Cause who likes to be held responsible for anything unpredictable happening in the universe that trips up your changes?
Theory of Bounded Rationality and its recommendations apply everytime any kind of limit is hit.
The UN/UNESCO/Pope etc have all been talking about it for a year or two now. We are slowly going to see the appearance of something called a Digital Public Good.
Its like a road/railroad/transmisson line builder trying to decide who, where and when people will use those object. Guess what? Through out history that delusion gets shat on.
I mean when the US replaced the Brits as Hegemon a large part of the world wasnt nervous about it.
Look at how a utlity works, in setting price specifically, for things that are considered a public good. The story is not about how much profit or revenue they make. Its about how do you keep it afloat and expanding in the coming year. Thats it.
Social Media is built on very weak info theoretical foundations. It will run into self created quagmires because of that lack of solid foundation in info/comms theory.
Saying the platforms can fix it is totally disconnected from what Information Theory has taught communication engineers for 100 years now.
Please remember one thing if nothing else - Social Media gave everyone Broadcast capability (1 to all messaging). In the past if you wanted to Broadcast every great thought that comes out of a 3 inch chimp brain to the entire planet, you had to stick a giant anatenna on your roof. Claude Shannon proved to us if everyone does that we get interference and noise. People who dont know any theory will then spend 24x7 reapeating their messages or broadcasting at higher and higher power to be heard. What happens? It all just increases noise.
This is exactly what social media produces. Huge noise and constantly shifting focus just to give everyone a feeling that the system is doing something useful when we all cant remember what even got attention yday.
It is a system that theory says cannot work unless there is a coordinating mechanism about who gets to broadcast. This is why we have licensed radio spectrum. No one complains about that because that is the coordinating mechanism. If there is none and illusion of broadcast is given to everyone noise, confusion, constantly shifting attention is the result.
Attention Economy/Social Media platforms exploited that piece of human nature. Its not just nerds trying to capture Attention but everyone. I have a cop buddy complaining about how top people in the police dept are competiting with each other for likes and views. Everyone gets trapped cuz pool of Attention to fish in is finite.
How do we get out of this situation? Platforms including HN have to be forced to show people that 1 View they get is actually a fraction because that viewer is going and reading 20 other things. By not showing it reality warps.
Plato gave us his Chariot analogy with 2 horse pulling in diff directions 3000 years ago. Today we got System 1/System 2, Elephant Rider model etc.
The human mind thanks to how its own architecture handles unpredictability in the universe will generate contadictions.