5 ms·

The universal decay of collective memory and attention

144 points by Hooke 8y ago

merlincorey 8y ago
In case anyone else was unclear what a biexponential[0] function is, it's a function that is the sum of two exponential values. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biexponential https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biexponential
- kwoff 8y ago
  (from the link) "In specific". Are my grammar sensors malfunctioning? (I can see that it's logically the opposite of "in general", and you can say both "generally" and "specifically", but... :)
spirographer 8y ago
An earlier version of the paper that is not behind a paywall: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5759bc7886db431d658b7d33/t/5ad7ae01575d1f7d693e8af9/1524084227435/Universal_Decay_Patterns_in_Human_Collective_Memory+%2810%29.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5759bc7886db431d658b7...
User23 8y ago
Recency bias is a major factor in performance reviews too, so, as every salesman knows, if you’re going to slack off do it at the start of the cycle.
- jaabe 8y ago
  This will be a bit of a sidetrack, but I find this interesting. I work for a Danish muniplacity, and we do BI on a lot of things, one of them is various degrees of employee performance, but because we're the public sector, we also do a great deal of research on how these benchmarks are viewed by employees and managers. We have extremely detailed tools for viewing week-to-week performance, progression, regression and changes over the year and we have an entire team dedicated to presenting this data in a way that managers can understand and use it to help their employees do better. Only our internal research into the effects of this, shows that things haven't really changed that much. If you enter a performance review on a good story about a recent success, that will mean a lot more than your statistical data. This is true even if a success story is only viewed as a success inside your own team, but not necessarily by the organisation. So we're spending all these resources on building BI, that makes it easier for managers to engage their employees, but it's still the old traditional ways that count, and that means recency bias as you call it, is still really important, even when it shouldn't be.
  - valesco 8y ago
    Well you still have your endpoint that will filter all these information with their bias.
    - r00fus 8y ago
      Which is a human with biological biases ( recency bias being built-in)
  - eecc 8y ago
    Well, you have data to indentify bias when it happens now. You can either use it to “equalize” distortions in judgement, or bring it as argument to abolish them
    - rightbyte 8y ago
      Given that there are less bias and systematic error in the review tools than in managers judgement ...
astazangasta 8y ago
Although they are only breath, words which I command are immortal -- Sappho, ca. 600 BC
- starbeast 8y ago
  "But he who thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much which is not serious, and that neither poetry nor prose, spoken or written, is of any great value, if, like the compositions of the rhapsodes, they are only recited in order to be believed, and not with any view to criticism or instruction; and who thinks that even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness, and that such principles are a man's own and his legitimate offspring;-being, in the first place, the word which he finds in his own bosom; secondly, the brethren and descendants and relations of his others;-and who cares for them and no others-this is the right sort of man; and you and I, Phaedrus, would pray that we may become like him." Attributed to Socrates, written down by Plato (in Phaedrus) ca. 360BC. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html Postmodernist comedy has a surprisingly long history, it appears.
  - AnonymousPlanet 8y ago
    What an awful translation. You might get away retaining the longwinded structure of some classic Greek sentences when translating into German. But in English, this just causes pain for your readers.
    - sonyandy 8y ago
      That's the joke.
    - starbeast 8y ago
      “In after-years he liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke the Piglet up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How interesting, and did she?” when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; 1st Mate, P. Bear) coming over the sea to rescue him.” from 'Winnie-the-Pooh', by A.A. Milne. ;)
hellofunk 8y ago
Even after reading the paper, I find their use of the word “biography” to be a bit strange.
- acqq 8y ago
  It measures if people are interested enough to read somebody’s Wikipedia entry: “Current popularity was measured using the number of pageviews received by the Wikipedia biography [39] of each athlete between J u1y 2016 and June 2017*”. They want to observe the decay of the interest in order to model it.
pmiller2 8y ago
Fittingly, this was also posted a day or two ago and got little response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18698855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18698855
- epai 8y ago
  This is a theory, but I feel that time of posting and accumulation of advantage (initial momentum makes it more noticeable, generating even more momentum) has more to do with a post getting more or less traction than a sort of collective memory decay, at least for this particular example.
kaffeemitsahne 8y ago
> In France, it is a dozen years now since a president of the republic, long since forgotten but at the time still floating on the spectacle's surface, naively expressed his delight at "knowing that henceforth we will live in a world without memory, where images chase each other, like reflections on the water." Convenient indeed for those in business, and who know how to stay there. The end of history gives current-day power a pleasant break. Success is absolutely guaranteed in all of power's undertakings, or at least the rumor of success. Debord, 1988
romeisendcoming 8y ago
This is generational decay. It happens on schedule. We always forget those who come before us when we can. Now it is extremely easy to do.
richardhod 8y ago
I find these premises unconvincing: 'Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of information (cultural memory). ' There are other means of sustaining collective memory and attention, such as performative actions, rituals and beliefs (if you can call beliefs channels - I don't have a definition for channels). If the first sentence is loose like this, I'm not optimistic for the modelling and variable construction for the rest of the work. I'll have a close read of it, but this is a disturbing sign.

144 points by Hooke 8y ago

In case anyone else was unclear what a biexponential[0] function is, it's a function that is the sum of two exponential values. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biexponential https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biexponential

kwoff 8y ago
(from the link) "In specific". Are my grammar sensors malfunctioning? (I can see that it's logically the opposite of "in general", and you can say both "generally" and "specifically", but... :)

spirographer 8y ago

An earlier version of the paper that is not behind a paywall: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5759bc7886db431d658b7d33/t/5ad7ae01575d1f7d693e8af9/1524084227435/Universal_Decay_Patterns_in_Human_Collective_Memory+%2810%29.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5759bc7886db431d658b7...

User23 8y ago

Recency bias is a major factor in performance reviews too, so, as every salesman knows, if you’re going to slack off do it at the start of the cycle.

jaabe 8y ago
This will be a bit of a sidetrack, but I find this interesting. I work for a Danish muniplacity, and we do BI on a lot of things, one of them is various degrees of employee performance, but because we're the public sector, we also do a great deal of research on how these benchmarks are viewed by employees and managers. We have extremely detailed tools for viewing week-to-week performance, progression, regression and changes over the year and we have an entire team dedicated to presenting this data in a way that managers can understand and use it to help their employees do better. Only our internal research into the effects of this, shows that things haven't really changed that much. If you enter a performance review on a good story about a recent success, that will mean a lot more than your statistical data. This is true even if a success story is only viewed as a success inside your own team, but not necessarily by the organisation. So we're spending all these resources on building BI, that makes it easier for managers to engage their employees, but it's still the old traditional ways that count, and that means recency bias as you call it, is still really important, even when it shouldn't be.
- valesco 8y ago
  Well you still have your endpoint that will filter all these information with their bias.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    Which is a human with biological biases ( recency bias being built-in)
- eecc 8y ago
  Well, you have data to indentify bias when it happens now. You can either use it to “equalize” distortions in judgement, or bring it as argument to abolish them
  - rightbyte 8y ago
    Given that there are less bias and systematic error in the review tools than in managers judgement ...

astazangasta 8y ago

Although they are only breath, words which I command are immortal -- Sappho, ca. 600 BC

starbeast 8y ago
"But he who thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much which is not serious, and that neither poetry nor prose, spoken or written, is of any great value, if, like the compositions of the rhapsodes, they are only recited in order to be believed, and not with any view to criticism or instruction; and who thinks that even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and seriousness, and that such principles are a man's own and his legitimate offspring;-being, in the first place, the word which he finds in his own bosom; secondly, the brethren and descendants and relations of his others;-and who cares for them and no others-this is the right sort of man; and you and I, Phaedrus, would pray that we may become like him." Attributed to Socrates, written down by Plato (in Phaedrus) ca. 360BC. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html Postmodernist comedy has a surprisingly long history, it appears.
- AnonymousPlanet 8y ago
  What an awful translation. You might get away retaining the longwinded structure of some classic Greek sentences when translating into German. But in English, this just causes pain for your readers.
  - sonyandy 8y ago
    That's the joke.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    “In after-years he liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an aunt who had once laid a seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes, at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part of the story, being what his aunt said, woke the Piglet up and just gave him time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How interesting, and did she?” when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; 1st Mate, P. Bear) coming over the sea to rescue him.” from 'Winnie-the-Pooh', by A.A. Milne. ;)

hellofunk 8y ago

Even after reading the paper, I find their use of the word “biography” to be a bit strange.

acqq 8y ago
It measures if people are interested enough to read somebody’s Wikipedia entry: “Current popularity was measured using the number of pageviews received by the Wikipedia biography [39] of each athlete between J u1y 2016 and June 2017*”. They want to observe the decay of the interest in order to model it.

pmiller2 8y ago

Fittingly, this was also posted a day or two ago and got little response: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18698855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18698855

epai 8y ago
This is a theory, but I feel that time of posting and accumulation of advantage (initial momentum makes it more noticeable, generating even more momentum) has more to do with a post getting more or less traction than a sort of collective memory decay, at least for this particular example.

kaffeemitsahne 8y ago

> In France, it is a dozen years now since a president of the republic, long since forgotten but at the time still floating on the spectacle's surface, naively expressed his delight at "knowing that henceforth we will live in a world without memory, where images chase each other, like reflections on the water." Convenient indeed for those in business, and who know how to stay there. The end of history gives current-day power a pleasant break. Success is absolutely guaranteed in all of power's undertakings, or at least the rumor of success. Debord, 1988

romeisendcoming 8y ago

This is generational decay. It happens on schedule. We always forget those who come before us when we can. Now it is extremely easy to do.

richardhod 8y ago

I find these premises unconvincing: 'Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of information (cultural memory). ' There are other means of sustaining collective memory and attention, such as performative actions, rituals and beliefs (if you can call beliefs channels - I don't have a definition for channels). If the first sentence is loose like this, I'm not optimistic for the modelling and variable construction for the rest of the work. I'll have a close read of it, but this is a disturbing sign.