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For what it's worth, I do not think people in the past were more informed than people today. If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time i

For what it's worth, I do not think people in the past were more informed than people today. If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history. What we're seeing is the breakdown of consolidated narratives. It used to be that people's beliefs were all wrong in the same way. You'll note that this looks basically identical to everyone being well informed. Now that we've moved into a regime of information abundance it looks like the world's gone crazy, when really it's just decohered. That said, youtube as a vector is spreading the most virulent memetic viruses we've ever seen. Hard to say how it shakes out though, memes aren't all bad. Everything good we've ever done started off as a meme too.

int_19h 6y ago
The problem is that memes themselves undergo natural selection, which favors the "bad" ones overall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
- AbrahamParangi 6y ago
  I don't think this is true in the long run, any more than genes which favor their propagation are bad in the long run. In the short term, viruses, cancers, shitty memes, doomsday cults and other low-sophistication replicators are favored. But long term you get things like multicellularity, complex nervous systems, the scientific method, civilization and art. The road may be rocky but I see no reason for it to be any different here.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    It's "bad" for us as individuals with our cultural background. It's not necessarily "bad" for the memes themselves, especially since the ultimate score in this game is to have an entire civilization proactively spreading the meme to others. Christianity, Islam, and other proselytizing religions are a good example.
    - AbrahamParangi 6y ago
      I suspect that the old, successful memes are good for their hosts by many definitions of good.
acituan 6y ago
> If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history. Quantity and access to information is only one side of the equation. The other side is relevance and the meaning that information affords us. If it doesn’t help us orient ourselves better in the world, if we can’t make sense of it, that information is useless, or even harmful. Decohered is the right word, but I don’t think it is only a product of the drastic increase in virality of memes. It is also our sense-making apparatus being broken or hugely behind the information influx that is created by the platform. This like informational obesity, influx of calories that can’t be translated into nutrition. Right now youtube’s policy layer and recommendation algorithms are the only machinery for deciding relevance and sense making on this exponential transfer of information happening. A black box machinery built for maximizing ad revenue, will naturally fall short on making us wiser, relevant or coherent. In fact, it is more natural for ad revenue maximizing to align better with us being more consumptive, polarized and addicted.

int_19h 6y ago

The problem is that memes themselves undergo natural selection, which favors the "bad" ones overall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

AbrahamParangi 6y ago
I don't think this is true in the long run, any more than genes which favor their propagation are bad in the long run. In the short term, viruses, cancers, shitty memes, doomsday cults and other low-sophistication replicators are favored. But long term you get things like multicellularity, complex nervous systems, the scientific method, civilization and art. The road may be rocky but I see no reason for it to be any different here.
- int_19h 6y ago
  It's "bad" for us as individuals with our cultural background. It's not necessarily "bad" for the memes themselves, especially since the ultimate score in this game is to have an entire civilization proactively spreading the meme to others. Christianity, Islam, and other proselytizing religions are a good example.
  - AbrahamParangi 6y ago
    I suspect that the old, successful memes are good for their hosts by many definitions of good.

acituan 6y ago

> If anything, more people are more informed today than at any time in history. Quantity and access to information is only one side of the equation. The other side is relevance and the meaning that information affords us. If it doesn’t help us orient ourselves better in the world, if we can’t make sense of it, that information is useless, or even harmful. Decohered is the right word, but I don’t think it is only a product of the drastic increase in virality of memes. It is also our sense-making apparatus being broken or hugely behind the information influx that is created by the platform. This like informational obesity, influx of calories that can’t be translated into nutrition. Right now youtube’s policy layer and recommendation algorithms are the only machinery for deciding relevance and sense making on this exponential transfer of information happening. A black box machinery built for maximizing ad revenue, will naturally fall short on making us wiser, relevant or coherent. In fact, it is more natural for ad revenue maximizing to align better with us being more consumptive, polarized and addicted.