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In the arms race for the public's attention that has been setup, by this clicks/views/likes/retweets/upvote based architecture, the incentive for thousand other voices to drown out the truth, to pander, to distract, to mislead has never been higher. And its not hard work. It attracts and props up the most hard working yet unqualified people on the planet.
Until the architecture changes and incentives for these people change, just expect more and more Brexit and Trump like events wasting everyone's time and energy.
It has nothing to do with violating physics. Its just about being part of hyper-connected systems where incremental change, is happening in a thousand different places along the entire assembly line that add up to huge gains that nobody can imagine individually.
Are we going to see things materializing at button press in an instant? No. But we are going to get damn close.
Lot of open source projects would benefit, if they had dedicated sales teams contacting firms day in, day out talking about their features.
People who run IT departments in the Enterprise world or even small firms lacking resources to keep up, just pick tools and make software decisions based on who reaches out to them.
Invest in a sales team and you penetrate markets that don't spend time monitoring developments in the tech world which is really the majority of all orgs. Elastic has done that quite well and is reaping the rewards.
They are on the front lines, in terms of contact with the weakest, poorest and most troubled members of society. They attract people who are suffering.
The growth and existence and passionate defense of religious institutions, despite all our advances, signal society isn't providing alternatives that perform the same function that contribute to well being and community.
The more religion gets attacked the less is focus on providing those alternatives. And those alternatives will come only with a deep understanding of what religion got right in dealing with human suffering.
It doesn't matter if the majority of them are struggling or rejecting things. All it takes is one of them to make a breakthrough. And then its like dominoes.
Once upon a time, most leaders hardly ever visited a gym or bothered about their health. Today it's a rare thing to find one that doesn't. That didn't happen overnight. The key is for them to see other leaders having success with the approach.
More than "coping" or "making it ok" it's how mountains get climbed. Try contributing to a story that gets someone to summit a mountain. It's much more fun and satisfying than analyzing a story.
Changing people's thinking and behavior, especially that of highly misguided characters in power, requires as Psychologist Marshall Rosenberg would say, choosing between Violence and Compassion.
Ideally for progress we want people to change the way they think about what they are doing, not spend their time defending it or how to get away with it. The latter being what we manage to keep doing.
This is where the choice of approach we take makes a huge difference.
Our Natural instinct is to choose violence, punishment, judgement, name and shame etc. We want to see heads role for suffering caused.
But this approach takes the focus off the suffering of the victim, and puts focus on how to cause pain to the perpetrator. It doesn't get perpetrators to change the way they think - to reflect. Instead they react - play defense, and spend their time and resources on avoiding and skirting punishment.
Think about this. Think about what Gandhi, MLK, Mandala did by not choosing this route. They didn't allow perpetrators to play that game. They showed us there is a big difference in outcomes when we tell a man - look at the pain you have caused VS you are <LABEL> and will be punished for the pain you have caused.
This ledger of harms concept is great, because it keeps focus on the suffering produced. It makes people in power squirm and reflect. Which is what plants the seeds of change. They will feel the need to change, just as the British Empire, US Govt or the South African govts did.
But as soon as you add punishment to each issue their focus will shift to self defense at all cost.
Until we see all the issues in one place like a github issue tracker, solutions will always be piece meal and confined to personal experience.
We need more issue trackers like this, so that people with solutions to one issue or another have some sense of the big picture. Also Big Tech cant weasel out of one issue by talking selectively about another.
Who knows, maybe one day we will get to proper integration/system wide testing for fixes to social issues...
While more than half the Chinese friends I made during grad school in the US after completing their PhD's or after getting work experience have returned home.
The results speak for themselves in the kind of companies the two countries have produced. There is no comparison between how Russia and China have treated their talent.
"Getting back up" after life knocks you down is a huge factor in their success. There are very few successful adults protected from life's blows given the competitive, cut throat world we live in. They all know something about getting thrown into deep holes and climbing back out.
However, I will say that a majority of successful adults, learn how to be resilient at the expense of the people around them.
Not because they are evil, but because no one has shown them better ways of how to handle situations they haven't faced before.
People don't realize how bad this used to be in the past. Nowadays we have much more access to info, better understanding of the right ways to "cope", better understanding of what to avoid, and the right people/environments that will pull one out of life's deep holes. It's nowhere near perfect but it's much better (if you have the resources as you pointed out).
In the past people were mostly just winging it. It's why you see a whole lot successful people who are also ruthless. And regret it towards the end of their lives as they tally the costs and see examples of better routes they could have traveled.
https://ledger.humanetech.com - to see the cumulative damage, engagement maximizing social networks/news media are doing.
People need to see the diverse effects in one place, otherwise they keep reacting in defense, selectively to individual issues that are raised that don't necessarily effect them personally.
Think of it as an github issue tracker not about software bugs, but about the social issues being created.
So if you are saying its contributing to "increased mental clarity and engagement" but the overflow is causing issues over time, then does this mean its just about finding the right dosage/frequency to maintain high clarity levels?
I guess its more like there is no free lunch here.
What is that crazy need we have to put in work, for no great gain, to keep utterly random people around the world updated in real time of whatever is going on?
These days, I seem to stop myself reading the news article , just head over to the right forum, and look for such comments. It's like the news industry has become more or less irrelevant, other than in surfacing a list of headlines, which then seed my "find best comment" search algorithm.
If a 70 year old is 4 hours away from a natural death and the tech raises an alarm and pulls in a surgeon to do emergency surgery that keeps him alive in a bed for another 10 years. That's a bad outcome in my book. And it happens all the time almost in automated fashion. Producing more suffering not less.
After the iPhone 4 or 5 it's been going no where vision wise.
Making it a social norm to get everyone on the planet to score everything that comes out of a mind should be treated as a violation of the ability to think independent thoughts and express oneself.
Throwing this arbit feedback loop into social interaction has changed social interaction and behavior without any debate. The fix to revert it is simple.
That is the only thing that needs to be spoken about. Everything else is a just a symptom of it.
If there is another triggering event like 9/11 (which kept the defense industry alive), it will be a real surprise to see the US muster a response the way they did in the past.
Does anyone seriously think something has fundamentally changed about the media since then?
The arms race for peoples attention is as bad as it has ever been.
The media is trapped by that fact and will be busy searching for the next bunch of characters who can top the ratings Trump gave them during the last campaign.
Sadly Warren won't fit their requirements.
To change the robotic way the media is going to be behaving requires a radical change in the underlying architecture that drives their behavior.
The like/view/click/retweet/upvote counts train these people neuralnet style in pandering. The counts should really be hidden while retaining the buttons so people can still like/upvote etc allowing the popularity, relevance, aggregation algos to still run.
It will change behavior of the press. A lot of the mindless fixation on the most divisive and superficial news won't be justifiable. Now like robots they keep pointing at the counts to justify their coverage of pointless garbage.
Faraday purely from experiments 30-40 years before Maxwell, intuitively understood electromagnetism. Nobody serious believed it because he didn't have the training to express it mathematically. Dyson is saying it took Physicists another 20-30 years post Maxwell to get it. So basically ~70 years wasted.