11 ms·

Unlimited Information Is Transforming Society

193 points by yarapavan 6y ago

CincinnatiMan 6y ago
> For better or worse, we can expect further blurring of many conventional boundaries—between work and home, between “amateurs” and professionals, and between public and private. Recently having a child, I'm definitely finding this blurring of amateurs and pros to be true. There's so many blogs and sites that say different things, it's hard to know what or who to believe. I wish there were just one highly-regarded expert source so that I could just go with what they say and not have to research every little thing.
- formalsystems 6y ago
  If you consider the Bloomberg article on SuperMicro, they repeatedly claim expert/insider sources corroborate their version of the story, and have issued no retraction after their story was thoroughly debunked. While this certainly reflects poorly on Bloomberg, it reflects most on the journalistic standards of the article's authors. I don't think we will ever have a world where authoritative sources exist, since there can always be elements within the source of authority willing to bend the truth for more clicks.
  - salawat 6y ago
    This makes sense if you remember that one of Bloomberg's reason to exist is to report news that moves markets. Truth or lies, it gets said all the same. Funny how prescient The Protomen seem to be.
    - jdsully 6y ago
      Seems an uncharitable interpretation. I would regard that more as a guide to the type of news they want their reporters to focus on - and what their audience wants to read. As far as corporate goals go its actually pretty specific and measurable.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    I think there is still something to that story. The authors involved are pretty good journalists from what I hear. I think that the coincidence of the US government's efforts to sanction chinese companies is a little suspect.
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      I'm also suspicious of the coincidence, but an organized disinformation attempt explains it just as well as a real event.
      - jjeaff 6y ago
        Yes, that is what I was alluding to. Which in that case, takes some of the onus off of the reporters and the paper, I think.
- Thev00d00 6y ago
  As another recent parent I absolutely agree, add in to the mix to Google any possible answer you want to see and it becomes pretty useless as a resource. I have given up on the internet for parenting information except for healthcare provider information.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    I've seen my share if incompetent healthcare providers. Better to do your own research. Instead of Google, use PubMed.
    - faitswulff 6y ago
      As a parent, there are so many things like "my child is hunching during breastfeeding, what does that mean?" or "why is baby choking during sleep" that you will find absolutely nothing on PubMed for.
      - giantg2 6y ago
        I'm just saying to verify what your provider tells you.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Ya, there is so much information on raising kids that is just pulled out of thin air. So I started pretty much ignoring anything I see online unless it is accompanied with studies that are done on largish sample sizes.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  With rearing a child, as stupid as it may sound, trust your gut. If something feels wrong - it probably is. Other than that - don't worry: the best parent is a happy parent. I was surprised to find out how many "child rearing" experts do not eat their own dog food or have no children altogether.
  - Andrex 6y ago
    > With rearing a child, as stupid as it may sound, trust your gut. If something feels wrong - it probably is. This feels like dangerous advice re: vaccinations.
    - eric_h 6y ago
      I believe the parent is presuming a higher base level of rationality in GP's "gut" than that of the population-at-large. While I'm not a parent, I'm certain that my "gut" would tell me that vaccinating my child is the opposite of wrong, however unpleasant for the child it might seem at the time. Of course, having watched friends become parents it's also quite clear that becoming a parent changes one's brain in some fundamental ways so it's possible you have a point ;)
      - Andrex 6y ago
        I accept the downvotes but I still feel like "by-the-gut" parenting has serious downsides that shouldn't be overlooked. It's possible being homosexual and raised in a conservative household has influenced that opinion, though.
        pstuart 6y ago
        Agreed. One should trust one's gut if it is trustworthy. Dunning-Kruger makes this advice moot ;-)
    - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
      Could you please elaborate a little bit? Which of the following do you see being dangerous: (a) ignoring achievements of modern science which can cure almost anything or (b) injecting a foreign substance into a bloodstream of otherwise healthy child in order to prevent a non-deadly decease this child will likely never have?
- drfuchs 6y ago
  Compare this to how it was pre-web: Just in time for the post-war baby boom, Dr. Benjamin Spock's "Baby and Child Care" was new parents' single go-to source of information for decades; selling over 50 million copies, it is one of the most popular books ever. His name recognition was exceedingly high; he'd regularly be mentioned on news and political shows, as well as in jokes on Laugh-In etc. The point being, you're certainly demonstrating an example of the recent trend where "voice of authority" is giving way to "the very notion of an expert is an elitist concept." Then again, maybe Spock is the explanation of all that ails us boomers?
- agumonkey 6y ago
  I have this view that the previous era of social structure was crafted through long trickles of actual know-how. This made the authority feels a bit stiff, but with the new open land of interwebs we're seeing how a "fluid" variant is mostly good to drown in. ps: side note, I tried to leverage access to direct science (pubmed and similar) and I was quite surprised that the struggle you describe for mundane topics (no offense to your family) is similar in deep research. A gazillions of publications all talking about similar things but with various conclusions and a lot of maybes. I kinda saw that human society is that thin autofocus line between high education doubts and high ignorance. We live in the 'field tested' middle ground which is not truer, just more agreed upon.
- bjelkeman-again 6y ago
  > I wish there were just one highly-regarded expert source so that I could just go with what they say and not have to research every little thing. I find the same with different subjects matters. Something I really needed to dive into, fish farming, in the end resulted in me taking a one year vocational course. That was a good expert source. Another thing I do, is work with recording music, as an amateur. Again a subject with tons of information available, most of it is poor IMHO. I know a vocational course would help, but most materials for this is not available publicly. It frustrates me that a lot of school material, paid for by the government, is behind a gatekeeper. Not sure how to solve that.
- Schroedingers2c 6y ago
  A few decent/expert/well researched sources ordered roughly (and subjectively) by unbiasedness: https://ourworldindata.org/ https://ourworldindata.org/ https://aeon.co/ https://aeon.co/ https://psyche.co/ https://psyche.co/ https://www.economist.com/ https://www.economist.com/ https://www.zeit.de/index https://www.zeit.de/index (for German speakers)
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
When I saw this, the adjacent story on HN was "Attention is your scarcest resource". That seems to me to be clearly a consequence of unlimited information.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  That headline is nonsense. I have unlimited attention.
  - umvi 6y ago
    Yes but you can only direct attention at 1 thing at a time, and you have limited time. Therefore your attention is limited.
ars 6y ago
This article is not about the title, rather it's a survey of societal changes over the last 200 or so years caused by Scientific and Engineering advances. If you read it with that in mind, it's much more interesting. If you are looking for an answer to the idea in the title, you won't find it.
rmrfstar 6y ago
The diffusion of technical expertise is an unalloyed good, but the article does not spend enough time exploring the interaction between dispersed expertise and concentrated market power. There are two very problematic phenomena: (1) plagiarism, and (2) quasi-legal corporate espionage. In (1) large companies just rip off FOSS code and call it a trade secret, as Goldman seems to have done. [1] In (2) companies that operate information infrastructure use it to surveill and preempt dispersed talent (as Amazon is alleged to have done with its market data, and Facebook is alleged to have done with its VPN app) [2]. The net effect of all this is suboptimal investment in new tools, techniques, procedures, and business models. You can't invest if you can't profit. A clear market failure demanding public intervention. [1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47281906 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47281906
- eternalban 6y ago
  Interesting point. Capital (still) trumps knowledge. There is a pop meme that tries to sell "information as the new oil", but your post reminds us that the 'value' of information is akin to 'weight' of a 'mass'. The gravitational field in question is centralized power, market or otherwise. [personal meta-aside: Did you know that JFK gave that speech to persuade American press to self-censor? That pull quote has been misused rather egregiously.]
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    Don't they usually mean data when they say information? And data is hardly freely available.
    - eternalban 6y ago
      I don’t know. Frankly it’s a bit of semantic muddle in my own head. For example, is my browsing history “data” or “information”? So for my own personal dictionary, “data” means basically ‘measure’, and “information” is ‘processed data’.
  - deleted 6y ago
neilkakkar 6y ago
Can someone explain how the title fits the article? I was .. pretty pissed once I reached the end (almost all of it interesting) to find it's not related to the title at all.
- julienchastang 6y ago
  Yes, I agree. The title was almost an afterthought barely addressed at the end, if at all.
  - aaron695 6y ago
    Original SciAm title was "Democratized Information Is Transforming Society" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/democratized-information-is-transforming-society/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/democratized-info... Which is worse?
deltron3030 6y ago
The printing press and education ecosystem it sparked was way more important for modernity than people give it credit for. Sure, people were motivated to read because they wanted to read the bible, but the skills were most useful for general education and bettering the quality of life. Imo, one reason Europe is behind digitally nowadays is related to taking the advantage that the printing infrastructure sparked for granted. Information technology and the democratisation of knowledge didn't start with computers, the're several IT milestones that improved the quality of life substantially, from fighting nature for survival and having no distributable time to asking yourself each morning what you're going to learn today. You can do anything you want, every niche you can find has inward paths that you can follow, and becoming good at something only depends on the time you're willing to invest. Having distributable time and developing skills in areas that interest you is pure luxury.
formalsystems 6y ago
> We're just starting to understand the implications. Thirty years after the invention of the printing press, one of the most popular printed books was the Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise on witchcraft which triggered a witch-hunting hysteria that lasted centuries. The corrosive effect of disinformation has been clear for centuries and the medium by which it is disseminated is, in my opinion, hardly the concern. My concern is that until very recently, the controllers of these mediums (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) insisted that all ideas deserve a level playing field, rather than accept that some ideas are simply better than others. > Before the 19th century, invention and innovation emerged primarily from craft traditions among people who were not scientists and who were typically unaware of pertinent scientific developments. I think for every pre-19th century innovation that occurred in an "information bubble" there were many more that depended on the Renaissance attitudes toward science and discovery that were themselves predicated on earlier discoveries. If I had to give a realistic estimate as to when innovation truly happened without knowledge of pertinent scientific developments, I would look back to pre-Galilean times.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ethanbond 6y ago
  > until very recently, the controllers of these mediums (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) insisted that all ideas deserve a level playing field This is absolutely not true. You can go ahead and write a full blown, grammatically correct and even narratively interesting novel, submit it to a publisher (owner of printing presses), and they are under no obligation to print your book. Further, that publisher may decline explicitly because they don’t like your ideas. There clearly are questions around FB/Twitter/Google/etc., but you seriously weaken your point making a claim like that.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    There wasn’t a single printing press. If one turned you down you just went to another. Also, “publisher” != “printing press”.
supernova87a 6y ago
This is a bit of a side point, but I don't think the amount of information is causing us trouble. It's the speed of it. Every day we're being asked (or exposed) to so many new topics (and movements) that our attention has to get divided for minutes at a time amongst so many things. And what does that lead to? Given so many things to pay attention to, we then have to resort to simplification -- symbols -- to decide what we want or not, what to vote for or against, when there's a world of complication underneath. We go from symbol to symbol, giving our upvote that causes huge amounts of disruption to the people and issues that have to deal with the day-to-day reality after we've moved on to the next new thing. We gave our vote based on the symbol (which often doesn't turn out to be what we thought it was), with little thought to the consequences in the details. I think it's a problem, how the speed of information is making life more shallow, yet more complicated and less satisfying.
- notassigned 6y ago
  Twitter seems to be the worst offender in this regard.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  yes information needs integration which depends on the integration speed of the recipient. let's wait 40 years, future generations will become capable of handling parallel streams of wiki updates without breaking a sweat
- mindcrime 6y ago
  Interestingly enough, this idea (or at least a variation of it) has been around for quite some time. Alvin Toffler[0] wrote about similar ideas in the late 1960's / early 1970's, and a lot of his thoughts are expressed in his book titled Future Shock[1] - which is also the term he coined for the phenomenon he was describing. Toffler and his work have been discussed here on HN a few times, but I'd particularly call out this discussion, from the article announcing his death. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004470 [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
dkobia 6y ago
"There's no such thing as information overload. There's only filter failure." ~ Clay Shirky
jimmyvalmer 6y ago
TL;DR Better title: "Where are all the flying cars?" A 3500-word survey of what worked (transistor-enabled computing and the internet) and what didn't (space travel and nuclear) post-WW2. As an alum of the author's employer, I never thought much of that "field of concentration" known as HistOfSci. Matt Damon's observation about library late charges was spot-on.
jariel 6y ago
One thing we're going to have to stop externalizing is the cost of change. The degree of fragmentation, required effort to upkeep etc. all to 'keep up' to a platform offering 'neat' features we don't care about? Too costly. We are not accounting for this yet, as soon as you take a second to think in at least 6-year time horizons, it starts to sink in. It's funny because I used to love 'new tech', and now I'm instinctively against it, knowing nothing about it other than 'not standard' is enough to make me feel the amount of extra labour required to deal with it. I like movements such as 'Rust' whereby we see a legit challenger to a foundational tech, but with enough enthusiasm and long term vision that one day, it will be a possible 'off the shelf choice'.
julienchastang 6y ago
As far as nuclear energy not seeing more widespread adoption, as readers of HN know, the fossil fuel industry is allowed to externalize costs while nuclear can’t as much for a variety of reasons (e.g., high profile nuclear disasters, etc.). If the true costs of fossil fuels could be better exposed, nuclear would be more competitive. That point is sort of tangential to the article but I wish the author had pointed that out in a sentence or two.
- loup-vaillant 6y ago
  Moreover, they gloss over the fact that Nuclear energy, despite its costs, compares very favourably to even renewable energy: compared to wind & solar, it emits several times less CO2, costs several time less (if you account for the batteries needed to store wind&solar energy), and even kills less (per unit of energy). Not renewable, so it won't last forever. But it sure can dampen the impending long term recession we'll get after Peak Oil. --- About externalization, it's even worse than most people think: it's not just about making others paying the costs, it's also about delaying payment. For instance, even if we were to stop greenhouse gas emissions right now, dividing our GDP by 2 or more overnight, we'll still get 1.5°C worth of warming in the future, with noticeable consequences already. Of course we won't do that, so the actual warming will be worse. Even more obvious, the depletion of various resources: oil, gas, beach sand, copper… What we should do, but almost certainly aren't doing, is computing the amortised costs of Global Warming (with population moving because it has become lethally hot in some regions, and lots of other "adjustments"), and the the amortized cost of the depletion of non-renewable resources of all kinds, that we won't be able to use at all at some point in the future; then writing that cost on our balance sheet. We'd probably notice we were heading to bankruptcy very fast if we wrote that amortized cost down.
  - Schiendelman 6y ago
    “If you account for the batteries needed” - eeeek, this is anti-renewable propaganda. These systems are proliferating all over the world without batteries today. The scenarios people posit that lead to that kind of propaganda don’t really exist at scale.
ipv6ipv4 6y ago
The trouble with the internet is that it precipitously lowers the barriers for the dissemination of anyone’s half baked ideas. In the past, being able to widely spread (mis)information was limited by circumstance, access, and most importantly, competence. Incompetent people were self limiting in their ability to spread their typically bad ideas because it was too hard. Now, any semi-literate buffoon with access to twitter or 4chan can reach millions. The competence filter is gone and now irrational ideas can spread like wildfire.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  I think we're still a few years away from someone figuring out a viable business model for curation, though. (I know I'd pay -- a reasonable amount, I'm poor -- for a service that increases the signal to noise ratio.)
  - ipython 6y ago
    It’s Neal Stephenson’s “edit stream”. I thought that was one of the best insights from Fall. See https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-vision-of-the-digital-afterlife https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-visi...
- warent 6y ago
  Folklore, rumors, and gossip are all as old as spoken language. Just a few hundred years ago, educated people still thought there were witches and magical monsters. Only the medium for story telling has changed, but now with the added benefit of it being a little easier to fact-check if interested. Things are definitely not worse like you're implying.
  - ipython 6y ago
    I think that the dramatically increased speed and volume cannot be so simply dismissed, however. That’s like saying “what’s the big deal with jet planes? We’ve had boats and wagons since forever”. Fact checking in particular is less effective since there is such an incentive to push out high volumes of information as quickly as possible. I take the example of writing a book for publication versus a tweet or blog post. The former requires a vetting process before it even starts, takes months if not years to complete, involves several phases of copy editing and technical review from multiple people, and finally there’s a published book at the end. The latter could be a single person banging on a phone keypad for a few minutes, or it could be a team who have extensively sourced over the course of months to produce a well thought out piece. The trouble is- you as a reader have no idea which is which! I think that we have too much information. It overloads our brains, and so we fall back on our more primitive instincts to cope. That ends up with us simply confirming pre existing biases and giving in to fear and anger. It’s like the thesis in the book “paradox of choice” but applied to information rather than brands of jeans or mayonnaise.
tehjoker 6y ago
https://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/Baudrillard's%20Thoughts%20On%20Media.htm https://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/Baudrillard's%... Jean Baudrillard on the media and hyperreality.
tuatoru 6y ago
Until three years ago I had a book in my stacks dating from 1962-ish,[1] called The Information Explosion, about how the modern deluge of information is transforming society. [1] Yes, I got it used. I'm not quite that old.

193 points by yarapavan 6y ago

> For better or worse, we can expect further blurring of many conventional boundaries—between work and home, between “amateurs” and professionals, and between public and private. Recently having a child, I'm definitely finding this blurring of amateurs and pros to be true. There's so many blogs and sites that say different things, it's hard to know what or who to believe. I wish there were just one highly-regarded expert source so that I could just go with what they say and not have to research every little thing.

formalsystems 6y ago
If you consider the Bloomberg article on SuperMicro, they repeatedly claim expert/insider sources corroborate their version of the story, and have issued no retraction after their story was thoroughly debunked. While this certainly reflects poorly on Bloomberg, it reflects most on the journalistic standards of the article's authors. I don't think we will ever have a world where authoritative sources exist, since there can always be elements within the source of authority willing to bend the truth for more clicks.
- salawat 6y ago
  This makes sense if you remember that one of Bloomberg's reason to exist is to report news that moves markets. Truth or lies, it gets said all the same. Funny how prescient The Protomen seem to be.
  - jdsully 6y ago
    Seems an uncharitable interpretation. I would regard that more as a guide to the type of news they want their reporters to focus on - and what their audience wants to read. As far as corporate goals go its actually pretty specific and measurable.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  I think there is still something to that story. The authors involved are pretty good journalists from what I hear. I think that the coincidence of the US government's efforts to sanction chinese companies is a little suspect.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    I'm also suspicious of the coincidence, but an organized disinformation attempt explains it just as well as a real event.
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      Yes, that is what I was alluding to. Which in that case, takes some of the onus off of the reporters and the paper, I think.
Thev00d00 6y ago
As another recent parent I absolutely agree, add in to the mix to Google any possible answer you want to see and it becomes pretty useless as a resource. I have given up on the internet for parenting information except for healthcare provider information.
- giantg2 6y ago
  I've seen my share if incompetent healthcare providers. Better to do your own research. Instead of Google, use PubMed.
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    As a parent, there are so many things like "my child is hunching during breastfeeding, what does that mean?" or "why is baby choking during sleep" that you will find absolutely nothing on PubMed for.
    - giantg2 6y ago
      I'm just saying to verify what your provider tells you.
- jjeaff 6y ago
  Ya, there is so much information on raising kids that is just pulled out of thin air. So I started pretty much ignoring anything I see online unless it is accompanied with studies that are done on largish sample sizes.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
With rearing a child, as stupid as it may sound, trust your gut. If something feels wrong - it probably is. Other than that - don't worry: the best parent is a happy parent. I was surprised to find out how many "child rearing" experts do not eat their own dog food or have no children altogether.
- Andrex 6y ago
  > With rearing a child, as stupid as it may sound, trust your gut. If something feels wrong - it probably is. This feels like dangerous advice re: vaccinations.
  - eric_h 6y ago
    I believe the parent is presuming a higher base level of rationality in GP's "gut" than that of the population-at-large. While I'm not a parent, I'm certain that my "gut" would tell me that vaccinating my child is the opposite of wrong, however unpleasant for the child it might seem at the time. Of course, having watched friends become parents it's also quite clear that becoming a parent changes one's brain in some fundamental ways so it's possible you have a point ;)
    - Andrex 6y ago
      I accept the downvotes but I still feel like "by-the-gut" parenting has serious downsides that shouldn't be overlooked. It's possible being homosexual and raised in a conservative household has influenced that opinion, though.
      - pstuart 6y ago
        Agreed. One should trust one's gut if it is trustworthy. Dunning-Kruger makes this advice moot ;-)
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    Could you please elaborate a little bit? Which of the following do you see being dangerous: (a) ignoring achievements of modern science which can cure almost anything or (b) injecting a foreign substance into a bloodstream of otherwise healthy child in order to prevent a non-deadly decease this child will likely never have?
drfuchs 6y ago
Compare this to how it was pre-web: Just in time for the post-war baby boom, Dr. Benjamin Spock's "Baby and Child Care" was new parents' single go-to source of information for decades; selling over 50 million copies, it is one of the most popular books ever. His name recognition was exceedingly high; he'd regularly be mentioned on news and political shows, as well as in jokes on Laugh-In etc. The point being, you're certainly demonstrating an example of the recent trend where "voice of authority" is giving way to "the very notion of an expert is an elitist concept." Then again, maybe Spock is the explanation of all that ails us boomers?
agumonkey 6y ago
I have this view that the previous era of social structure was crafted through long trickles of actual know-how. This made the authority feels a bit stiff, but with the new open land of interwebs we're seeing how a "fluid" variant is mostly good to drown in. ps: side note, I tried to leverage access to direct science (pubmed and similar) and I was quite surprised that the struggle you describe for mundane topics (no offense to your family) is similar in deep research. A gazillions of publications all talking about similar things but with various conclusions and a lot of maybes. I kinda saw that human society is that thin autofocus line between high education doubts and high ignorance. We live in the 'field tested' middle ground which is not truer, just more agreed upon.
bjelkeman-again 6y ago
> I wish there were just one highly-regarded expert source so that I could just go with what they say and not have to research every little thing. I find the same with different subjects matters. Something I really needed to dive into, fish farming, in the end resulted in me taking a one year vocational course. That was a good expert source. Another thing I do, is work with recording music, as an amateur. Again a subject with tons of information available, most of it is poor IMHO. I know a vocational course would help, but most materials for this is not available publicly. It frustrates me that a lot of school material, paid for by the government, is behind a gatekeeper. Not sure how to solve that.
Schroedingers2c 6y ago
A few decent/expert/well researched sources ordered roughly (and subjectively) by unbiasedness: https://ourworldindata.org/ https://ourworldindata.org/ https://aeon.co/ https://aeon.co/ https://psyche.co/ https://psyche.co/ https://www.economist.com/ https://www.economist.com/ https://www.zeit.de/index https://www.zeit.de/index (for German speakers)

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

When I saw this, the adjacent story on HN was "Attention is your scarcest resource". That seems to me to be clearly a consequence of unlimited information.

HenryKissinger 6y ago
That headline is nonsense. I have unlimited attention.
- umvi 6y ago
  Yes but you can only direct attention at 1 thing at a time, and you have limited time. Therefore your attention is limited.

ars 6y ago

This article is not about the title, rather it's a survey of societal changes over the last 200 or so years caused by Scientific and Engineering advances. If you read it with that in mind, it's much more interesting. If you are looking for an answer to the idea in the title, you won't find it.

rmrfstar 6y ago

The diffusion of technical expertise is an unalloyed good, but the article does not spend enough time exploring the interaction between dispersed expertise and concentrated market power. There are two very problematic phenomena: (1) plagiarism, and (2) quasi-legal corporate espionage. In (1) large companies just rip off FOSS code and call it a trade secret, as Goldman seems to have done. [1] In (2) companies that operate information infrastructure use it to surveill and preempt dispersed talent (as Amazon is alleged to have done with its market data, and Facebook is alleged to have done with its VPN app) [2]. The net effect of all this is suboptimal investment in new tools, techniques, procedures, and business models. You can't invest if you can't profit. A clear market failure demanding public intervention. [1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldma... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47281906 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47281906

eternalban 6y ago
Interesting point. Capital (still) trumps knowledge. There is a pop meme that tries to sell "information as the new oil", but your post reminds us that the 'value' of information is akin to 'weight' of a 'mass'. The gravitational field in question is centralized power, market or otherwise. [personal meta-aside: Did you know that JFK gave that speech to persuade American press to self-censor? That pull quote has been misused rather egregiously.]
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Don't they usually mean data when they say information? And data is hardly freely available.
  - eternalban 6y ago
    I don’t know. Frankly it’s a bit of semantic muddle in my own head. For example, is my browsing history “data” or “information”? So for my own personal dictionary, “data” means basically ‘measure’, and “information” is ‘processed data’.
- deleted 6y ago

neilkakkar 6y ago

Can someone explain how the title fits the article? I was .. pretty pissed once I reached the end (almost all of it interesting) to find it's not related to the title at all.

julienchastang 6y ago
Yes, I agree. The title was almost an afterthought barely addressed at the end, if at all.
- aaron695 6y ago
  Original SciAm title was "Democratized Information Is Transforming Society" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/democratized-information-is-transforming-society/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/democratized-info... Which is worse?

deltron3030 6y ago

The printing press and education ecosystem it sparked was way more important for modernity than people give it credit for. Sure, people were motivated to read because they wanted to read the bible, but the skills were most useful for general education and bettering the quality of life. Imo, one reason Europe is behind digitally nowadays is related to taking the advantage that the printing infrastructure sparked for granted. Information technology and the democratisation of knowledge didn't start with computers, the're several IT milestones that improved the quality of life substantially, from fighting nature for survival and having no distributable time to asking yourself each morning what you're going to learn today. You can do anything you want, every niche you can find has inward paths that you can follow, and becoming good at something only depends on the time you're willing to invest. Having distributable time and developing skills in areas that interest you is pure luxury.

formalsystems 6y ago

> We're just starting to understand the implications. Thirty years after the invention of the printing press, one of the most popular printed books was the Malleus Maleficarum, a treatise on witchcraft which triggered a witch-hunting hysteria that lasted centuries. The corrosive effect of disinformation has been clear for centuries and the medium by which it is disseminated is, in my opinion, hardly the concern. My concern is that until very recently, the controllers of these mediums (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) insisted that all ideas deserve a level playing field, rather than accept that some ideas are simply better than others. > Before the 19th century, invention and innovation emerged primarily from craft traditions among people who were not scientists and who were typically unaware of pertinent scientific developments. I think for every pre-19th century innovation that occurred in an "information bubble" there were many more that depended on the Renaissance attitudes toward science and discovery that were themselves predicated on earlier discoveries. If I had to give a realistic estimate as to when innovation truly happened without knowledge of pertinent scientific developments, I would look back to pre-Galilean times.

deleted 6y ago
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ethanbond 6y ago
> until very recently, the controllers of these mediums (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) insisted that all ideas deserve a level playing field This is absolutely not true. You can go ahead and write a full blown, grammatically correct and even narratively interesting novel, submit it to a publisher (owner of printing presses), and they are under no obligation to print your book. Further, that publisher may decline explicitly because they don’t like your ideas. There clearly are questions around FB/Twitter/Google/etc., but you seriously weaken your point making a claim like that.
- kortilla 6y ago
  There wasn’t a single printing press. If one turned you down you just went to another. Also, “publisher” != “printing press”.

supernova87a 6y ago

This is a bit of a side point, but I don't think the amount of information is causing us trouble. It's the speed of it. Every day we're being asked (or exposed) to so many new topics (and movements) that our attention has to get divided for minutes at a time amongst so many things. And what does that lead to? Given so many things to pay attention to, we then have to resort to simplification -- symbols -- to decide what we want or not, what to vote for or against, when there's a world of complication underneath. We go from symbol to symbol, giving our upvote that causes huge amounts of disruption to the people and issues that have to deal with the day-to-day reality after we've moved on to the next new thing. We gave our vote based on the symbol (which often doesn't turn out to be what we thought it was), with little thought to the consequences in the details. I think it's a problem, how the speed of information is making life more shallow, yet more complicated and less satisfying.

notassigned 6y ago
Twitter seems to be the worst offender in this regard.
agumonkey 6y ago
yes information needs integration which depends on the integration speed of the recipient. let's wait 40 years, future generations will become capable of handling parallel streams of wiki updates without breaking a sweat
mindcrime 6y ago
Interestingly enough, this idea (or at least a variation of it) has been around for quite some time. Alvin Toffler[0] wrote about similar ideas in the late 1960's / early 1970's, and a lot of his thoughts are expressed in his book titled Future Shock[1] - which is also the term he coined for the phenomenon he was describing. Toffler and his work have been discussed here on HN a few times, but I'd particularly call out this discussion, from the article announcing his death. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004470 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12004470 [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

dkobia 6y ago

"There's no such thing as information overload. There's only filter failure." ~ Clay Shirky

jimmyvalmer 6y ago

TL;DR Better title: "Where are all the flying cars?" A 3500-word survey of what worked (transistor-enabled computing and the internet) and what didn't (space travel and nuclear) post-WW2. As an alum of the author's employer, I never thought much of that "field of concentration" known as HistOfSci. Matt Damon's observation about library late charges was spot-on.

jariel 6y ago

One thing we're going to have to stop externalizing is the cost of change. The degree of fragmentation, required effort to upkeep etc. all to 'keep up' to a platform offering 'neat' features we don't care about? Too costly. We are not accounting for this yet, as soon as you take a second to think in at least 6-year time horizons, it starts to sink in. It's funny because I used to love 'new tech', and now I'm instinctively against it, knowing nothing about it other than 'not standard' is enough to make me feel the amount of extra labour required to deal with it. I like movements such as 'Rust' whereby we see a legit challenger to a foundational tech, but with enough enthusiasm and long term vision that one day, it will be a possible 'off the shelf choice'.

julienchastang 6y ago

As far as nuclear energy not seeing more widespread adoption, as readers of HN know, the fossil fuel industry is allowed to externalize costs while nuclear can’t as much for a variety of reasons (e.g., high profile nuclear disasters, etc.). If the true costs of fossil fuels could be better exposed, nuclear would be more competitive. That point is sort of tangential to the article but I wish the author had pointed that out in a sentence or two.

loup-vaillant 6y ago
Moreover, they gloss over the fact that Nuclear energy, despite its costs, compares very favourably to even renewable energy: compared to wind & solar, it emits several times less CO2, costs several time less (if you account for the batteries needed to store wind&solar energy), and even kills less (per unit of energy). Not renewable, so it won't last forever. But it sure can dampen the impending long term recession we'll get after Peak Oil. --- About externalization, it's even worse than most people think: it's not just about making others paying the costs, it's also about delaying payment. For instance, even if we were to stop greenhouse gas emissions right now, dividing our GDP by 2 or more overnight, we'll still get 1.5°C worth of warming in the future, with noticeable consequences already. Of course we won't do that, so the actual warming will be worse. Even more obvious, the depletion of various resources: oil, gas, beach sand, copper… What we should do, but almost certainly aren't doing, is computing the amortised costs of Global Warming (with population moving because it has become lethally hot in some regions, and lots of other "adjustments"), and the the amortized cost of the depletion of non-renewable resources of all kinds, that we won't be able to use at all at some point in the future; then writing that cost on our balance sheet. We'd probably notice we were heading to bankruptcy very fast if we wrote that amortized cost down.
- Schiendelman 6y ago
  “If you account for the batteries needed” - eeeek, this is anti-renewable propaganda. These systems are proliferating all over the world without batteries today. The scenarios people posit that lead to that kind of propaganda don’t really exist at scale.

ipv6ipv4 6y ago

The trouble with the internet is that it precipitously lowers the barriers for the dissemination of anyone’s half baked ideas. In the past, being able to widely spread (mis)information was limited by circumstance, access, and most importantly, competence. Incompetent people were self limiting in their ability to spread their typically bad ideas because it was too hard. Now, any semi-literate buffoon with access to twitter or 4chan can reach millions. The competence filter is gone and now irrational ideas can spread like wildfire.

tuatoru 6y ago
I think we're still a few years away from someone figuring out a viable business model for curation, though. (I know I'd pay -- a reasonable amount, I'm poor -- for a service that increases the signal to noise ratio.)
- ipython 6y ago
  It’s Neal Stephenson’s “edit stream”. I thought that was one of the best insights from Fall. See https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-vision-of-the-digital-afterlife https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-visi...
warent 6y ago
Folklore, rumors, and gossip are all as old as spoken language. Just a few hundred years ago, educated people still thought there were witches and magical monsters. Only the medium for story telling has changed, but now with the added benefit of it being a little easier to fact-check if interested. Things are definitely not worse like you're implying.
- ipython 6y ago
  I think that the dramatically increased speed and volume cannot be so simply dismissed, however. That’s like saying “what’s the big deal with jet planes? We’ve had boats and wagons since forever”. Fact checking in particular is less effective since there is such an incentive to push out high volumes of information as quickly as possible. I take the example of writing a book for publication versus a tweet or blog post. The former requires a vetting process before it even starts, takes months if not years to complete, involves several phases of copy editing and technical review from multiple people, and finally there’s a published book at the end. The latter could be a single person banging on a phone keypad for a few minutes, or it could be a team who have extensively sourced over the course of months to produce a well thought out piece. The trouble is- you as a reader have no idea which is which! I think that we have too much information. It overloads our brains, and so we fall back on our more primitive instincts to cope. That ends up with us simply confirming pre existing biases and giving in to fear and anger. It’s like the thesis in the book “paradox of choice” but applied to information rather than brands of jeans or mayonnaise.

tehjoker 6y ago

https://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/Baudrillard's%20Thoughts%20On%20Media.htm https://www.philosophicalsociety.com/Archives/Baudrillard's%... Jean Baudrillard on the media and hyperreality.

tuatoru 6y ago

Until three years ago I had a book in my stacks dating from 1962-ish,[1] called The Information Explosion, about how the modern deluge of information is transforming society. [1] Yes, I got it used. I'm not quite that old.