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There's a quote in a Michael Crichton novel (The Lost World) that seems relevant here. As part of a rant connecting the idea of the internet and evolution, a ch

There's a quote in a Michael Crichton novel (The Lost World) that seems relevant here. As part of a rant connecting the idea of the internet and evolution, a character opines: "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity."

adt2bt 5y ago
See: Edison bulbs in every dark bar worldwide. This phenomenon is real.
amelius 5y ago
On the other hand, are tribes or nations which are not intimately connected to the western world that much better off? And science evolved greatly in the highly interconnected parts of the world.
- notriddle 5y ago
  They aren’t better off. That’s what makes this whole thing so dire — there’s value in being different, just for the sake of being different, but nobody is going to willingly choose to do something materially worse just on the off-chance that the Current Best Practice happens to have some horrible, unseen downside 50 years later.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jack_pp 5y ago
That's a pessimistic way of putting it. "In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas"... but aren't those brought about by evolution as well? And as far as I can see the top ten keeps changing, evolving. My argument is that the internet has enabled hyper-evolution. You get access to the best possible information, you have through torrents and libgen access to all the media and books ever produced at your fingertips, free of charge. What you might've figured out in 30 years of your own trials and tribulations can now be learned in a couple of years reading books. Of course pride and arrogance keeps us from learning but that's a different story and will probably be weeded out by evolution much faster now than ever before thanks to free access to information.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  But isn't this exactly why you end up slowing down? You get groups trapped in local maxima of behavior. An isolated group is forced to find novel solutions because they don't have a body of evidence to lean back on. In comparison, if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that. It might be sub-optimal, but the odds you develop something better are low. So it benefits you to use the established method. But the group at large would benefit more from having lots of people try novel things, because otherwise innovation stagnates as the "known" solution takes precedence everywhere.
  - bumby 5y ago
    >if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that. It might be sub-optimal, but the odds you develop something better are low. There’s ways around this, though. For example, occasionally accepting a method that’s worse in the short term can eventually lead to a better long term solution. The likelihood of accepting a worse solution can be inversely proportional to how much worse it is to the current solution. The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm does exactly this to avoid local maxima. Meaning you just need some people to take a seemingly worse idea and run with it occasionally. I think there will always be a few brave or naive souls willing to do that.
  - 5y ago
Ko76 5y ago
I am a big Crichton fan and wish he was around to skewer Fuckerberg & Co. Truth is we haven't got to 5 billion online. Just getting 3 billion online has run into massive issues that has split the net in many ways no one imagined. It doesn't look like we will ever get to 5 billion. So there is some baked in natural resistance. Andrew Odlyzko is looking like he was onto something when he said Metcalfe and Reeds Law of network growth would not hold. Primarily the limitation is the 6 inch chimp brain and the Dunbar number. If the avg chimp has the channel capacity for a 100 ppl max what's the point of all this connectivity? We are taking our sweet time to realise it.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Recommend a book by him besides Jurassic park (which I read already)?
  - avhon1 5y ago
    The Andromeda Strain
  - koe3 5y ago
    Airframe (explains quite well how the corporate world deals with crisis or failures) Micro (is a Honey I shrunk the kids story but with a much more jurassic park science vibe. Have no idea why its hasn't been made into a movie) Timeline (has been made into a movie and is a cool time travel story)
jdmoreira 5y ago
On the other hand if "global uniformity" stops us from nuking each other to smithereens than maybe it's not a bad thing. Sure... we might not innovate enough, hopefully we don't decline to the point of pre-industrial levels but at least we might have a chance to make it out alive; instead of being in a creative destruction process akin to evolution.
paulpauper 5y ago
H
2939223 5y ago
Globalism is the great filter. Social media is the first taste. COVID as an example, would have previously been a contained regional outbreak. Globalism made it an instant problem for every continent. Social media exacerbated responses in most every country. Interconnectivity is fragility.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Plenty of global pandemics before COVID. Globalisation is how we got so many viable vaccinations so quickly. Monocultures are fragile. The only part of globalisation that gives me cause for concern is that it can make bigger monopolies that would otherwise be possible.
cortesoft 5y ago
I get the sentiment, and there might be nuggets of truth to the idea, but there are some fundamental aspects of biological evolution that make it different. Biology evolves through mutation propagation, and larger populations tend to regress mutations to the mean more than smaller populations. Behavior changes don't require any mutations, and they can be shared in all directions (unlike mutations, which can only be shared with descendants) This already fundamentally changes how societies can evolve. Second, if this were true, the number of innovations would have decreased after we became globally connected. This hasn't been the case, as we have continued to innovate and create new things even after we have been globally connected. While our global society does propagate some homogeneity (McDonalds and Starbucks everywhere), it also lets innovations spread very quickly, which gives more chances for amazing new things to propagate.
- tracerbulletx 5y ago
  Agree 100% with everything you said here. Continuing with the example of food, the ability to watch a Youtube video about an emerging food trend on Saturday, try making it on Sunday because they taught me how to do it, then watch 5 more channels doing the same idea in different ways, and eventually understand the idea enough to use the techniques does not seem to be restricting the evolution of ideas in any way and seems to actually rapidly accelerate it.
- version_five 5y ago
  > Second, if this were true, the number of innovations would have decreased after we became globally connected. This hasn't been the case I read the argument as being about diversity. There are innovations, but as you point out in the next paragraph, they spread quickly, which could be good, but also destroys a lot of diversity. Look at how different UI design trends spread e.g. I don't consider that a clear win. Having many less connected groups could potentially lead to more, and more diverse innovations, vs. everyone jumping on the same bandwagon The other thing that spreads more quickly is disease (here I mean metaphorically). If everything is the same, it gets infected the same way, and I believe there is an element of that when you look at online discourse, at dark patterns and other user hostile business practices, etc. There are some reasons homogeneity is good, especially locally in time, but it presents an evolutionarily disadvantage over longer scales, which is what I took to be the point of the MC quote
RGamma 5y ago
Diversity: bottom-up Uniformity: top-down
lamontcg 5y ago
So you're saying a wide varity of echo chambers is a good thing to avoid intellectual monoculture?
- klipt 5y ago
  I think echo chambers are part of the problem. Previously you'd love in your village and have to get along with other villagers (or move, which took a lot of effort) so people had to learn to compromise more. Now everyone can live in virtual echo chambers where everyone agrees with them and they never need to compromise. So they start viewing anyone who disagrees with them as pure evil.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    "Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest."
    - gentleman11 5y ago
      Can any biologist reading this confirm or deny this statement?
      - rleigh 5y ago
        Broadly true. It's standard stuff. Think about Charles Darwin and his writing about the unusual diversity of the species on the Galapagos islands, which are small and isolated. There are numerous other examples, e.g. pygmy species on Mediterranean islands (now extinct). When population numbers within a species are large, interbreeding will tend to dilute genetic mutations within the total population. When populations are small, e.g. due to physical isolation or temporal isolation, mutations are more likely to spread and become established. This is increased further when selective pressure is applied.
    - bart_spoon 5y ago
      Small groups that are isolated aren’t necessarily echo chambers devoid of diversity. The point is the existence of disconnect between small groups, not the homogeneity within groups.
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
I dunno. Every time species from that big Eurasian land mass -- say, house cats -- showed up on an island, there was an extinction event. Every time an isolated tribe meets "civilization", 90% of the tribe drops dead from unfamiliar pathogens. Being wired in to the big Evolution Chamber seems to forge a kind of strength (not that it's peaceful). Evolution has more dice to roll.
prox 5y ago
Nicholas Taleb puts forth the same ideas, where he believes in fractalistic localities, in order to improve anti fragility.
specialist 5y ago
The Last Archive's It Came From Outer Space [S01E06] helped me better understand Crichton. https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-2/episode-6-it-came-from-outer-space https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-2/episode-6-it-came-fr... My own TLDR: Explains how the trauma and betrayal experienced by Boomers impacted that generation, and how it may have forged Crichton's personal philosophy.
nickt 5y ago
Yeah but, life finds a way.
marcosdumay 5y ago
> Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. This is more than backwards. Evolution does not only accelerate when you connect small populations into a larger one, it also starts happening on a higher level, selecting over collections of traits larger than what was possible before. Group diversity (like speciation) of course depends on isolation, but individual diversity does not. It depends on a series of factors that are completely different for memetic and biologic evolution. (Personally, I don't know how either react to isolation, but since the author got wrong every single fact that I know, I don't imagine he has any idea either.)
aeon_19 5y ago
It is a nice new thinking direction. But this is posted on the wrong place. This is HN where tons of people who make their living off the connected web congregate. Hence you won't get very objective opinions here.
lifeplusplus 5y ago
In other words, the diversity of ideas reduces as you become super connected the only few popular ideas are entertained and alternatives are censored. I saw it first hand when I migrated to USA, here people religiously watched news and had very uniform, fixed ideas about policies, whereas where I came from TV was still a luxury back then. I found people more open minded willing to engage in different views. The more connected we become the less diverse we get in terms of perspectives.

adt2bt 5y ago

See: Edison bulbs in every dark bar worldwide. This phenomenon is real.

amelius 5y ago

On the other hand, are tribes or nations which are not intimately connected to the western world that much better off? And science evolved greatly in the highly interconnected parts of the world.

notriddle 5y ago
They aren’t better off. That’s what makes this whole thing so dire — there’s value in being different, just for the sake of being different, but nobody is going to willingly choose to do something materially worse just on the off-chance that the Current Best Practice happens to have some horrible, unseen downside 50 years later.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jack_pp 5y ago

That's a pessimistic way of putting it. "In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas"... but aren't those brought about by evolution as well? And as far as I can see the top ten keeps changing, evolving. My argument is that the internet has enabled hyper-evolution. You get access to the best possible information, you have through torrents and libgen access to all the media and books ever produced at your fingertips, free of charge. What you might've figured out in 30 years of your own trials and tribulations can now be learned in a couple of years reading books. Of course pride and arrogance keeps us from learning but that's a different story and will probably be weeded out by evolution much faster now than ever before thanks to free access to information.

horsawlarway 5y ago
But isn't this exactly why you end up slowing down? You get groups trapped in local maxima of behavior. An isolated group is forced to find novel solutions because they don't have a body of evidence to lean back on. In comparison, if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that. It might be sub-optimal, but the odds you develop something better are low. So it benefits you to use the established method. But the group at large would benefit more from having lots of people try novel things, because otherwise innovation stagnates as the "known" solution takes precedence everywhere.
- bumby 5y ago
  >if you have an existing, known solution to a problem it usually makes sense to just use that. It might be sub-optimal, but the odds you develop something better are low. There’s ways around this, though. For example, occasionally accepting a method that’s worse in the short term can eventually lead to a better long term solution. The likelihood of accepting a worse solution can be inversely proportional to how much worse it is to the current solution. The Metropolis-Hastings algorithm does exactly this to avoid local maxima. Meaning you just need some people to take a seemingly worse idea and run with it occasionally. I think there will always be a few brave or naive souls willing to do that.
- 5y ago

Ko76 5y ago

I am a big Crichton fan and wish he was around to skewer Fuckerberg & Co. Truth is we haven't got to 5 billion online. Just getting 3 billion online has run into massive issues that has split the net in many ways no one imagined. It doesn't look like we will ever get to 5 billion. So there is some baked in natural resistance. Andrew Odlyzko is looking like he was onto something when he said Metcalfe and Reeds Law of network growth would not hold. Primarily the limitation is the 6 inch chimp brain and the Dunbar number. If the avg chimp has the channel capacity for a 100 ppl max what's the point of all this connectivity? We are taking our sweet time to realise it.

gentleman11 5y ago
Recommend a book by him besides Jurassic park (which I read already)?
- avhon1 5y ago
  The Andromeda Strain
- koe3 5y ago
  Airframe (explains quite well how the corporate world deals with crisis or failures) Micro (is a Honey I shrunk the kids story but with a much more jurassic park science vibe. Have no idea why its hasn't been made into a movie) Timeline (has been made into a movie and is a cool time travel story)

jdmoreira 5y ago

On the other hand if "global uniformity" stops us from nuking each other to smithereens than maybe it's not a bad thing. Sure... we might not innovate enough, hopefully we don't decline to the point of pre-industrial levels but at least we might have a chance to make it out alive; instead of being in a creative destruction process akin to evolution.

paulpauper 5y ago

2939223 5y ago

Globalism is the great filter. Social media is the first taste. COVID as an example, would have previously been a contained regional outbreak. Globalism made it an instant problem for every continent. Social media exacerbated responses in most every country. Interconnectivity is fragility.

ben_w 5y ago
Plenty of global pandemics before COVID. Globalisation is how we got so many viable vaccinations so quickly. Monocultures are fragile. The only part of globalisation that gives me cause for concern is that it can make bigger monopolies that would otherwise be possible.

cortesoft 5y ago

I get the sentiment, and there might be nuggets of truth to the idea, but there are some fundamental aspects of biological evolution that make it different. Biology evolves through mutation propagation, and larger populations tend to regress mutations to the mean more than smaller populations. Behavior changes don't require any mutations, and they can be shared in all directions (unlike mutations, which can only be shared with descendants) This already fundamentally changes how societies can evolve. Second, if this were true, the number of innovations would have decreased after we became globally connected. This hasn't been the case, as we have continued to innovate and create new things even after we have been globally connected. While our global society does propagate some homogeneity (McDonalds and Starbucks everywhere), it also lets innovations spread very quickly, which gives more chances for amazing new things to propagate.

tracerbulletx 5y ago
Agree 100% with everything you said here. Continuing with the example of food, the ability to watch a Youtube video about an emerging food trend on Saturday, try making it on Sunday because they taught me how to do it, then watch 5 more channels doing the same idea in different ways, and eventually understand the idea enough to use the techniques does not seem to be restricting the evolution of ideas in any way and seems to actually rapidly accelerate it.
version_five 5y ago
> Second, if this were true, the number of innovations would have decreased after we became globally connected. This hasn't been the case I read the argument as being about diversity. There are innovations, but as you point out in the next paragraph, they spread quickly, which could be good, but also destroys a lot of diversity. Look at how different UI design trends spread e.g. I don't consider that a clear win. Having many less connected groups could potentially lead to more, and more diverse innovations, vs. everyone jumping on the same bandwagon The other thing that spreads more quickly is disease (here I mean metaphorically). If everything is the same, it gets infected the same way, and I believe there is an element of that when you look at online discourse, at dark patterns and other user hostile business practices, etc. There are some reasons homogeneity is good, especially locally in time, but it presents an evolutionarily disadvantage over longer scales, which is what I took to be the point of the MC quote

RGamma 5y ago

Diversity: bottom-up Uniformity: top-down

lamontcg 5y ago

So you're saying a wide varity of echo chambers is a good thing to avoid intellectual monoculture?

klipt 5y ago
I think echo chambers are part of the problem. Previously you'd love in your village and have to get along with other villagers (or move, which took a lot of effort) so people had to learn to compromise more. Now everyone can live in virtual echo chambers where everyone agrees with them and they never need to compromise. So they start viewing anyone who disagrees with them as pure evil.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  "Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest."
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    Can any biologist reading this confirm or deny this statement?
    - rleigh 5y ago
      Broadly true. It's standard stuff. Think about Charles Darwin and his writing about the unusual diversity of the species on the Galapagos islands, which are small and isolated. There are numerous other examples, e.g. pygmy species on Mediterranean islands (now extinct). When population numbers within a species are large, interbreeding will tend to dilute genetic mutations within the total population. When populations are small, e.g. due to physical isolation or temporal isolation, mutations are more likely to spread and become established. This is increased further when selective pressure is applied.
  - bart_spoon 5y ago
    Small groups that are isolated aren’t necessarily echo chambers devoid of diversity. The point is the existence of disconnect between small groups, not the homogeneity within groups.

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

I dunno. Every time species from that big Eurasian land mass -- say, house cats -- showed up on an island, there was an extinction event. Every time an isolated tribe meets "civilization", 90% of the tribe drops dead from unfamiliar pathogens. Being wired in to the big Evolution Chamber seems to forge a kind of strength (not that it's peaceful). Evolution has more dice to roll.

prox 5y ago

Nicholas Taleb puts forth the same ideas, where he believes in fractalistic localities, in order to improve anti fragility.

specialist 5y ago

The Last Archive's It Came From Outer Space [S01E06] helped me better understand Crichton. https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-2/episode-6-it-came-from-outer-space https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-2/episode-6-it-came-fr... My own TLDR: Explains how the trauma and betrayal experienced by Boomers impacted that generation, and how it may have forged Crichton's personal philosophy.

nickt 5y ago

Yeah but, life finds a way.

marcosdumay 5y ago

> Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. This is more than backwards. Evolution does not only accelerate when you connect small populations into a larger one, it also starts happening on a higher level, selecting over collections of traits larger than what was possible before. Group diversity (like speciation) of course depends on isolation, but individual diversity does not. It depends on a series of factors that are completely different for memetic and biologic evolution. (Personally, I don't know how either react to isolation, but since the author got wrong every single fact that I know, I don't imagine he has any idea either.)

aeon_19 5y ago

It is a nice new thinking direction. But this is posted on the wrong place. This is HN where tons of people who make their living off the connected web congregate. Hence you won't get very objective opinions here.

lifeplusplus 5y ago

In other words, the diversity of ideas reduces as you become super connected the only few popular ideas are entertained and alternatives are censored. I saw it first hand when I migrated to USA, here people religiously watched news and had very uniform, fixed ideas about policies, whereas where I came from TV was still a luxury back then. I found people more open minded willing to engage in different views. The more connected we become the less diverse we get in terms of perspectives.