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More discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus (here we are, 14 years later than the book; ar

More discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_Surplus (here we are, 14 years later than the book; are there any obvious examples of freed cognitive surplus changing the world in the interim?)

bluetomcat 3y ago
The cognitive surplus has been captured by social media "influencers" and big corporations providing the platforms. The relevant read for the 2020s is "Technofeudalism" by Yanis Varoufakis.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Thanks, I'll have to read that. Fortunately that capture is mostly voluntary: nothing but loss of mod-cons prevents anyone from descending from the platforms* of the eloi and seeking the caverns of the morlocks. Then awa tae the hill to the lee and the rocks Ere I own a usurper I'll crouch with the fox * each of which is filled with screenshots of the other 5?
robertlagrant 3y ago
> freed cognitive surplus changing the world I think it's freed economic surplus that does this. If you have enough money to buy an electric car, you fund future electric car development. If you have enough money to buy a ticket on a rocket ship, you fund future rocket ship development. The problem with cognitive surplus is it needs something to aim at. If there's nothing new being invented or pursued, it reverts to attention: better marketing, nicer recruitment, etc etc, that just increase competitiveness within an established field. That's all nice, but it doesn't unlock progress that would obsolete human effort or polluting methods, or anything technoutopian like that.
rapnie 3y ago
My (entirely anecdotal) observation is that while digital tools may have freed cognitive surplus, the continuous information bombardment and distractions of the attention economy does not work to align motivations to join collaborative efforts. The cognitive surplus is used to tailor ones own preferences for what to work on, and people fragment rather than unite. "Your initiative is nice, but not for me as I am aware of so many choices I would make differently".
- jhoechtl 3y ago
  There seems to be a mechanism built into humans that they do not make use of that cognitive surplus. In the sense that they are unable to collectively build a tower up into the sky (Tower of Babel). But this also varies from societys and the things they value. From hear-say collective thinking is ubiquituous in the Chinese society with Chinese people shaking their heads in disbelieve when we talk about individualism. It's also worth noting that individualism was the credo of last 30? years of education in the western hemisphere.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jasode 3y ago
>; are there any obvious examples of freed cognitive surplus changing the world in the interim? I think Wikipedia is an obvious example. The vast majority of its content and edits comes from enthusiastic amateurs who have other fulltime jobs unrelated to writing encyclopedias. A bunch of humans' "surplus free time" continuously adds/improves Wikipedia. (E.g. even the most prolific Wikipedia editor has a day job at US Customs & Border Protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt) Another example that's underappreciated is the massive amount of amateur Youtube videos spreading knowledge (especially the DIY tutorials, building projects, repairing cars/homes/appliances, testing products, etc). I compare that social dissemination phenomenon to the famous "monkeys learning from other monkeys on how to wash potatos" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect Most of those Youtube videos are also created by people who have fulltime jobs so they expend their cognitive surplus recording content that can be valuable. This HN website of user comments and and Stack Overflow answers are also the product of cognitive surplus enabled by the so-called read+write Web 2.0. The early Linux development in 1990s could be argued as cognitive surplus because it was a collaboration of unpaid volunteer effort. That may have changed because I think I saw statistics saying most contributions now come from paid employees of corporations. Linux is just a major example but you could argue than any popular open source project that's mostly unpaid volunteers has the potential to change the world. E.g. OpenStreetMap.
- Gravityloss 3y ago
  I still think the biggest bottleneck is curation. Searching for videos gives me a lot of spam. Same on so many platforms. The constant technological warfare between spammers and indexers, and it looks like currently spammers and trolls are a bit ahead the historical average on most platforms? That's one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so good, because they curate very strictly (many say overly strictly). Also Hacker News curates discussion quite heavily to make it very much better than most other forums. That is very laborious and involves both peer review and central review and all kinds of algorithms and software tooling. There are some new innovations like X community notes that have come out of research work. I have participated in forums since the BBS era and can see a lot of repeating negative patterns that basically all discussion platforms just trip on, over and over. Whoever creates a service with a comments section should be aware...
gumby 3y ago
This is an apolitical comment! If you reply please avoid the political aspects! I’ve been thinking of the MAGA movement using this framework (though I hadn’t seen this great little essay before). A lot of its adherents are older people who have retired and have a lot of free time. Many of them grew up in an age of going to concerts and other mass events, (though I don’t think Woodstock actually changed the world). Many of the events can be “joined” in a slightly less passive way than merely watching TV, but are similar in that a set of professionals produce it and then you basically attend or watch. Also it is participatory, and is not just older people, so people can jump in and use the same sense of spectacle to be seen as well. Q is a good example, but there are many. Another is the anti vaxer movement which arose at a time when people were not financially desperate but had a lot of free time. Regardless of what you think of these phenomena, one cannot deny that they have “changed the world in the interim”. I used to be an unalloyed fan (and was trying to work towards) of a future of universal unemployment: a utopian future where robots do all the work, the marginal cost of manufacturing is nil, and humans just do what they like: write bad poetry, hang out, etc. I never anticipated that such a Star Trek world free of wants would still have political movements.
- thechao 3y ago
  I've been slowly weening myself off of ... internet (damn you, HN!); but I saw a phrase on my wife's FB feed: don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1%. I think this summarizes my feeling towards social media, entirely. I think it helps to explain why a lot of people can be simultaneously very well off (compared to, say, the USA in 1990), yet completely dissatisfied with their lives.
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1% Also, don't think that the 1% of your "friends" are the 99%. I remember seeing a post a while ago that pointed out that, mathematically, the average person on Facebook has far fewer friends than their friends have. While that seems paradoxical (maybe even impossible), the reason for this is that, if you think of "number of friends" as a bell curve, people with tons of friends on the right side of the curve, by definition, show up as friends of many more people than folks further to the left of the curve. If you're one of these "other people", you might think "Gosh, my have friends on average have many more friends than I have, I must be a loser", when in reality you could be just in the middle of the bell curve (or even substantially to the right of the bell curve) in terms of number of friends. That is, the average person (or, again, even significantly above average) is basically comparing themselves to all of these "superconnectors". Of course, that happens in lots of other places in social media (the only videos on TikTok etc. that get up voted are the guy that speaks 32 languages or the mogul skier that can do a triple back flip...), I really like the "on average you have fewer friends than your friends" example because it is a simple yet very unintuitive consequence of graph math.

bluetomcat 3y ago

The cognitive surplus has been captured by social media "influencers" and big corporations providing the platforms. The relevant read for the 2020s is "Technofeudalism" by Yanis Varoufakis.

082349872349872 3y ago
Thanks, I'll have to read that. Fortunately that capture is mostly voluntary: nothing but loss of mod-cons prevents anyone from descending from the platforms* of the eloi and seeking the caverns of the morlocks. Then awa tae the hill to the lee and the rocks Ere I own a usurper I'll crouch with the fox * each of which is filled with screenshots of the other 5?

robertlagrant 3y ago

> freed cognitive surplus changing the world I think it's freed economic surplus that does this. If you have enough money to buy an electric car, you fund future electric car development. If you have enough money to buy a ticket on a rocket ship, you fund future rocket ship development. The problem with cognitive surplus is it needs something to aim at. If there's nothing new being invented or pursued, it reverts to attention: better marketing, nicer recruitment, etc etc, that just increase competitiveness within an established field. That's all nice, but it doesn't unlock progress that would obsolete human effort or polluting methods, or anything technoutopian like that.

rapnie 3y ago

My (entirely anecdotal) observation is that while digital tools may have freed cognitive surplus, the continuous information bombardment and distractions of the attention economy does not work to align motivations to join collaborative efforts. The cognitive surplus is used to tailor ones own preferences for what to work on, and people fragment rather than unite. "Your initiative is nice, but not for me as I am aware of so many choices I would make differently".

jhoechtl 3y ago
There seems to be a mechanism built into humans that they do not make use of that cognitive surplus. In the sense that they are unable to collectively build a tower up into the sky (Tower of Babel). But this also varies from societys and the things they value. From hear-say collective thinking is ubiquituous in the Chinese society with Chinese people shaking their heads in disbelieve when we talk about individualism. It's also worth noting that individualism was the credo of last 30? years of education in the western hemisphere.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jasode 3y ago

>; are there any obvious examples of freed cognitive surplus changing the world in the interim? I think Wikipedia is an obvious example. The vast majority of its content and edits comes from enthusiastic amateurs who have other fulltime jobs unrelated to writing encyclopedias. A bunch of humans' "surplus free time" continuously adds/improves Wikipedia. (E.g. even the most prolific Wikipedia editor has a day job at US Customs & Border Protection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pruitt) Another example that's underappreciated is the massive amount of amateur Youtube videos spreading knowledge (especially the DIY tutorials, building projects, repairing cars/homes/appliances, testing products, etc). I compare that social dissemination phenomenon to the famous "monkeys learning from other monkeys on how to wash potatos" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredth_monkey_effect Most of those Youtube videos are also created by people who have fulltime jobs so they expend their cognitive surplus recording content that can be valuable. This HN website of user comments and and Stack Overflow answers are also the product of cognitive surplus enabled by the so-called read+write Web 2.0. The early Linux development in 1990s could be argued as cognitive surplus because it was a collaboration of unpaid volunteer effort. That may have changed because I think I saw statistics saying most contributions now come from paid employees of corporations. Linux is just a major example but you could argue than any popular open source project that's mostly unpaid volunteers has the potential to change the world. E.g. OpenStreetMap.

Gravityloss 3y ago
I still think the biggest bottleneck is curation. Searching for videos gives me a lot of spam. Same on so many platforms. The constant technological warfare between spammers and indexers, and it looks like currently spammers and trolls are a bit ahead the historical average on most platforms? That's one of the reasons why Wikipedia is so good, because they curate very strictly (many say overly strictly). Also Hacker News curates discussion quite heavily to make it very much better than most other forums. That is very laborious and involves both peer review and central review and all kinds of algorithms and software tooling. There are some new innovations like X community notes that have come out of research work. I have participated in forums since the BBS era and can see a lot of repeating negative patterns that basically all discussion platforms just trip on, over and over. Whoever creates a service with a comments section should be aware...

gumby 3y ago

This is an apolitical comment! If you reply please avoid the political aspects! I’ve been thinking of the MAGA movement using this framework (though I hadn’t seen this great little essay before). A lot of its adherents are older people who have retired and have a lot of free time. Many of them grew up in an age of going to concerts and other mass events, (though I don’t think Woodstock actually changed the world). Many of the events can be “joined” in a slightly less passive way than merely watching TV, but are similar in that a set of professionals produce it and then you basically attend or watch. Also it is participatory, and is not just older people, so people can jump in and use the same sense of spectacle to be seen as well. Q is a good example, but there are many. Another is the anti vaxer movement which arose at a time when people were not financially desperate but had a lot of free time. Regardless of what you think of these phenomena, one cannot deny that they have “changed the world in the interim”. I used to be an unalloyed fan (and was trying to work towards) of a future of universal unemployment: a utopian future where robots do all the work, the marginal cost of manufacturing is nil, and humans just do what they like: write bad poetry, hang out, etc. I never anticipated that such a Star Trek world free of wants would still have political movements.

thechao 3y ago
I've been slowly weening myself off of ... internet (damn you, HN!); but I saw a phrase on my wife's FB feed: don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1%. I think this summarizes my feeling towards social media, entirely. I think it helps to explain why a lot of people can be simultaneously very well off (compared to, say, the USA in 1990), yet completely dissatisfied with their lives.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > don't compare your 99% to everyone else's 1% Also, don't think that the 1% of your "friends" are the 99%. I remember seeing a post a while ago that pointed out that, mathematically, the average person on Facebook has far fewer friends than their friends have. While that seems paradoxical (maybe even impossible), the reason for this is that, if you think of "number of friends" as a bell curve, people with tons of friends on the right side of the curve, by definition, show up as friends of many more people than folks further to the left of the curve. If you're one of these "other people", you might think "Gosh, my have friends on average have many more friends than I have, I must be a loser", when in reality you could be just in the middle of the bell curve (or even substantially to the right of the bell curve) in terms of number of friends. That is, the average person (or, again, even significantly above average) is basically comparing themselves to all of these "superconnectors". Of course, that happens in lots of other places in social media (the only videos on TikTok etc. that get up voted are the guy that speaks 32 languages or the mogul skier that can do a triple back flip...), I really like the "on average you have fewer friends than your friends" example because it is a simple yet very unintuitive consequence of graph math.