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The interesting idea I read here is that systems that were originally intended to measure the real world, like a traffic map or social network, become so influe
by cookingrobot 8y ago
The interesting idea I read here is that systems that were originally intended to measure the real world, like a traffic map or social network, become so influential they have a major effect on the thing it measures. This could result in an interesting new steady state, like side roads filled to capacity with people following Waze directions, or fractued networks of filter bubbles. Or instead of steady state the system might be unstable, like massive volatility cause by algorithmic trading. The “analog” metaphor here is that the user isn’t the consumer of a carefully design system, but they’re one “electron” in the circuit that carries many users, and the overall behavior of the system depends on what they and millions of other users do as they interact with each other. In that way he suggests the outcome is not planned and is probably unpredictable.
- hprotagonist 8y agoGoodheart's Law, the recursive edition.
- GrantS 8y agoAgreed, it takes awhile to get there but the core idea comes toward the end: The genius — sometimes deliberate, sometimes accidental — of the enterprises now on such a steep ascent is that they have found their way through the looking-glass and emerged as something else. Their models are no longer models. The search engine is no longer a model of human knowledge, it is human knowledge. What began as a mapping of human meaning now defines human meaning, and has begun to control, rather than simply catalog or index, human thought. No one is at the controls. If enough drivers subscribe to a real-time map, traffic is controlled, with no central model except the traffic itself. The successful social network is no longer a model of the social graph, it is the social graph. This is why it is a winner-take-all game. Governments, with an allegiance to antiquated models and control systems, are being left behind.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoIf the search engine is now human knowledge that would explain why everything seems to have gotten dumber in the last few years. We are all google now.
- pnathan 8y agoYes, I don't buy most of what the essay said, but that was bang on, generally. I disagree heavily with the last sentence, but the bit about how we've generally shifted from models->actuality is very, very true. It's acutely obvious when you look for knowledge that isn't in the consensual standard places online, or really try to use Google as a search engine as opposed to a handy-dandy bookmark replacement thing.
- pesmhey 8y agoCould you give an example of looking for knowledge that isn’t in the concensual standard places online, where that search ends up finding nothing?
- pnathan 8y agoNot a specific thing, no. It tends to be trade knowledge or bits of history & beliefs that were printed, or orally known. I have a certain store of oral history regarding a few 20thC movements that was passed down, for instance. But there are no electronic editions of that information - if you find it on Wikipedia, it'll be filtered, somewhat mangled, and altogether minimal in description. These days when I want to find obscure knowledge, I purchase books written on the topic by scholars; they concentrate the information very well with good sourcing.
- pickpuck 8y ago"Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
- narrator 8y agoI don't think China's being left behind. They have a successful system of censorship. In the west we are slowly being led down the path where we've moved our knowledge and understanding of the world to the hands of private companies who deplatform and delete whole universes of information on a whim. Large subreddits getting banned for example deletes tends of thousands of man hours of work from existence.
- AJ007 8y agoEC2 and Google Cloud concern me a lot more than Facebook and Reddit. A lot of those censor-able platforms have only been successful because the users believed they were using something different than it actually was (surprise, Tumblr users.) We still have Wikipedia, Archive.org, Bittorrent, Tor, Bitcoin, and so on. To define China's system of censorship as successful seems premature. We have had similar systems in the past, and while they maintained some form of stability for the status quo they ultimately hindered those society's progress. "It is true that if you have a tyranny of ideas, so that you know exactly what has to be true, you act very decisively, and it looks good – for a while. But soon the ship is heading in the wrong direction, and no one can modify the direction any more." -Richard Feynman
- skookumchuck 8y agoI.e. it's a feedback system. Feedback has been successfully mathematically modeled for over 100 years.
- pjc50 8y agoLinear is easily modelled. Nonlinear isn't - Lorenz attractor, weather forecasting etc.
- paganel 8y ago> like side roads filled to capacity with people following Waze directions I had a feeling related to this when a couple of months ago, after I had given a friend a ride, she told me that she was really amazed of how I was driving around without using an always-on GPS map. I realized that for people in my age (their 20s and 30s) driving in a car now involves being dependent on your GPS maps.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoIt is great for being alerted to congestion problems, but many times if you are familiar with the route, you can find optimizations the mapping software can’t.
- bookofjoe 8y agoYes! Yesterday, driving home from a grocery store five miles away on my usual [fastest] route via the interstate, I told Google maps "home." I guess the AI was having a bad day because it spent the entire ten-minute trip frantically rerouting and giving me new instructions every ten seconds as it tried to route me via city streets alongside and across the interstate's path. I watched the proposed spaghetti-like route on my phone's screen as my car icon cruised along right up the middle. Very amusing. Reminded me of one of those sci-fi films where the robot short-circuits and sparks and speaks word salad.
- KeyboardFire 8y agoThat might just have been a failure with the GPS -- I've had the same issue before, but the car icon was offset a bit from the highway, so it looked like I was constantly driving on the grass next to it (that must have come as a surprise to the little imps inside my phone doing the navigating).
- toyg 8y agoGps is particularly remarkable in the way it completely impedes the development of any ability to navigate routes independently. The only technology I’ve seen with such an incredible brain-atrophizing power, is the calculator.
- rv-de 8y agoFirst people connected with friends on Facebook. Now if you are not connected on Facebook - you're not friends.
- narrator 8y agoMy really close friends and I have slow chats that we post stuff to once a week or so. Facebook is more for acquaintances.
- coldtea 8y agoThat's increasingly the way of the past.
- WAthrowaway 8y agoah jeez better tell all my friends that we aren't actually friends since I don't have facebook...
- AltruisticGap 8y agoThe article also reminded me about Simulacra and Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation How what we create ends up shaping us. For example, what we think of "reality" today, is the fiction we created in sitcoms and television shows that shaped our view of the world when we grew up. We dress like "cool" people, we dance like "cool" people, we imitate one another.. so in the end we become the fiction. But to be honest I don't know which way to read the article. Besides the main "emergent / unplanned" idea I'm not sure what his point is. edit: I guess he meant to say that the "digital revolution" promised more control over our lives, and instead it is becoming something completely unplanned.
- james_s_tayler 8y agoI don't know if it's used elsewhere but I think in the 70s George Soros put forward a model of the economy that he called "reflexivity" where the central idea is that actors act upon things based on their perception of those things and those things change based on how they are acted upon thus changing how they are perceived by the actors and changing how the actors act upon them in a reflexive loop. It can be applied to many things.