kopo

Slightly off-topic sorry. Does common crawl data contain HN/Quora/Reddit content? And is it possible to extract Question/Answers to support something like "Related Questions" in StackOverflow?

And he wrote the "Undoing Project" to explain why this happens. Not his best book but a decent laymen intro for those interested in Behavioral Psychology.

The general populations would have to learn about thousands of people then in hundreds of fields. This notion that the general population "needs to know XYZ" is a requirement to keep celeb culture afloat, more than actual value to society. We live in the info age, which means people who are interested in a subject will easily find the people who made significant contributions.

Reality is not simple to decipher in an environment of info overload.

Imagine walking into a huge library. Every book has descriptions of complex problems. Some books have solutions. Some books don't. But you can only read one book at a time. In that library you can focus on the book that matches your needs and skills. And the world doesn't seem too crazy.

Now imagine the same library, but with a thousand different people shouting at you to come look at the problem in some book they picked just up. What kind of reality are you going to experience in that library?

They just need to stick a banner above all of them saying watching this Ad is injurious to your mind.

If its up to me that would be on every news website and tv channel too. Along with a live ticker on how much revenue is being generated through ad sales.

Man can you imagine if 1 billion people end up with brain tumors. How would that even get handled? I have no idea how hard tumor surgery is but I am guessing hospitals will have to be turned into large Foxconn type factories or something.

I see handwriting has gone to the dogs these days so maybe he is onto something...

erm...Osama was rich. His target was Wall St.

Good comment. But it is not about "forcing" an outcome. These kind of polarizing sensitive issues are never resolved long term through forcing any issue.

At their best these movements make people feel the hurt/injustice and need for safety being expressed underneath all the noise/reactions/counter reactions.

Once a majority in the room feel it the movement has succeeded. This entire process ofcourse doesn't align neatly with our cultural conditioning that change happens through confrontation and punishment.

All they have to do is hide the like count.

And humanity can return to normal human communication without a count influencing every behaviour and thought.

They can still use the counts behind the scenes to surface popular content and whatever else they do with it.

They removed the image from the main article for some reason but I thought this was cool - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Cognitive_Bias_Codex_...

You only get to understand what a massive role Google plays in the like/click/view generating ecosystem when you spend time in a modern digital publishing/advertising/marketing firm. It's like watching a huge cattle auction where peoples views/clicks etc are being traded 24*7.

That's what happens when they are conditioned to produce content that maximizes view/click counts. Who created that incentive? Google did.

We seem to have moved from one person (Snowden type) dissent of institutional bullshit to groups standing up.

The current bunch of leaders are great at keeping the ship on course to well known destinations (scale at all costs/maximize profits/wage war to keep peace).

If the destination has to change, a new crop of leaders will have to take this bunch on. And it won't happen without employees making their voice heard.

Good point and well put.

These issues were being raised as far back as 2005-6 when debates were raging about whether likes/clicks/views and other "easy to collect" numbers were the right proxies for peoples needs and feelings. We know which camp prevailed.

What's changed is people's reaction and awareness. Hopefully we learn how to inject some love into the machine and dilute the apathy.

Yuval Harari keeps saying this, that we live in a time where the systems know our weaknesses better then we know them ourselves.

It is addictive. But atleast they have the maxvisit, minaway, delay settings available to provide some minimal way to reduce the pull.

Social networks need to have such tooling, that should automatically nudge people to take it easy when heavy usage is detected.

Here is one way WhatsApp efffects mothers - https://scroll.in/magazine/834036/indian-schools-are-using-w...

When the thinking is do whatever it takes to scale, the unintended effects are too numerous for people to comprehend.

hmmm...almost like a therapist I suppose.

Interesting point. Thanks!

Reminds me. Few months ago a friend was wrestling with one of those big life changing decisions everyone faces sometime or the other. He spent a whole lot of time meticulously analysing pros and cons, but just couldn't decide one way or another. Then one day he does this "remote" tarot card reading session (facepalm) and bam! Decision made. I was shocked. Don't know how many times I had to then hear, "...but dude just look at what the tarot card said". Psycologists really need to figure out how this "magic" works and how we can use it more effectively.

For every dollar passive investors produce in the market active investors produce 22. Who do you think is paid more attention too?

Good to see. Also nice to watch Facebook and Twitter and Youtube employees being called out for what they have enabled. If you are smart enough to get a job anywhere, why even work to keep these toxic machines propped up? Time to bail before things get worse. Or read a book about the decline of Yahoo.

These are "Passive" investors. Wall Street doesn't care about them. Reality reflects it.

Wall Street money is just the money of 1%. The 1% need to get on board.

This is true in the sense that there is no nice safe straight path up a hard to climb mountain.

There are going to be ups and downs. And yes we are fucking things up right now, because exploiting each other is easier than helping each other climb. But its all part of learning. The more we fuck up the more we learn how not to fuck up. And have learnt a lot. About human behavior thanks to trump and brexit. If tech and psychology can mislead entire populations by pushing a couple buttons, it can also do the opposite. Those buttons are being cooked up as we speak.

I don't think we are going to have any more great world wars (people around the world aren't as desperate to enroll in the military as they once were for employment) but we are going to have huge shocks to the system that will force us each time to learn from our fuck ups. It's not going to be a nice pleasant stroll up the mountain. But human nature is to climb nonetheless.

Not the first time someone has bought it up on a Google stage Tim Wu, Yuval Harari, Clay Shirky...

I am going to remember your going camping metaphor :) Minus mum and dad. This is the period where everyone figures out how to get along. Fingers crossed!

It's not about being stable but the pressure on everyone to keep the fully connected network stable that matters. Wrote up a longer comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18271594

Yes there are very good reasons for hierarchy.

Stability of the group being the main one (i.e. preventing it from splintering). Who ever is at the top of the hierarchy is expected to resolve the battles/differences unfolding at the lower levels to keep it stable especially when it is in competition with another hierarchy.

Will the transition work? Yes it will because we are at a point where no one individual or org has the power to dominate the network anymore. The network has grown orders of magnitude larger than any single hierarchy within it. And the pressure on each hierarchy to NOT splinter away is huge.

Just watch the guys at the top being overwhelmed. The 2008 financial crisis showed what happens when the network is threatened. It just pushes people to keep the larger network intact. It doesn't matter what their job titles are or where they individually stand in the hierarchy.

Same pressure you will see coming to bear on one Genghis Khan type character after another try to wrestle for overall control or disconnect to maintain control. Things will keep blowing up in their faces with all kinds of unintended and unpredictable consequences. Look at Facebooks fakenews response from 2 years ago to today. Look at whats happening with Brexit pushback. Look at Iran and North Korea not wanting to be isolated. Look at China realizing the impact of a trade war. Look at Saudi feeling the pressure to change. Look at Google unable to get its own employees to build a Chinese search engine.

All these are signs the guys at the top of all these hierarchies are struggling to get their hierarchies to do what they want because these hierarchies are now part of a much much larger network. And the only way they maintain its stability is to keep that network intact.

At these scales we aren't operating like a troupe of chimps or a pride of lions anymore with alphas. We resemble more a shoal of fish or a wildebeest herd. There is no central leadership.

And thats not a bad thing if you have ever seen a bunch of murmurating starlings. It will take some time for the Genghis Khan types to get with the programme though, at a cost to lot of people at the bottom of the food chain.