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>; 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
by 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 agoI 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...
- specialist 3y agoAgree with all. > ...biggest bottleneck is curation Yes and: I conluded ~1989 that curation was biggest value-add. A surplus of information ("infoglut" h/t BYTE Magazine) creates a scarcity of intepretation. Source: Was a "thread blaster" on CompuServe. Ran hub for modest niche BBS network. aka "Sysadmin". Spent most of my time moderating, filtering, summarizing, intepretting, operations, etc. Basically proto-journalism. Every day, I'm flabberghasted that social media forfeited that job/roll to recommenders. Algorithmic hate machines vs curation. Completely misses the point. Is proactively harming people and society. For the banality of mere profits. > ...X community notes A welcome innovation. Delighted it seems to be working. Very surprised it happened during Musk's reign. Would appreciate any links, cites about communite notes, if you have them handy. TIA.
- LeonB 3y agoI feel like an open social-graph could be used to create reputation and trust - opening up a lot of things and closing down many avenues of exploitation … or I guess I used to feel that way, that the combination of FoaF (friend-of-a-friend), OPML and RSS would somehow usher in a type of freedom. But Social Media TM sucked all the oxygen out of the room and locked away any hope of such things being broadly interoperable or able to create any general value that wasn’t fully controlled.
- Gravityloss 3y agoHmm sorry don't have anything. I recall hearing about some international research project that was used as input when creating the Twitter community notes but can't find it anymore. Interesting graphical tools exist nowadays to navigate the citation web and I guess one could try to backpropagate from this paper by Twitter employees, (Wojcik 2022):: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723 https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15723 Example navigation tool: https://www.connectedpapers.com/main/f983a4e27b457a502fba322be1efb675639dde86/Birdwatch%3A-Crowd-Wisdom-and-Bridging-Algorithms-can-Inform-Understanding-and-Reduce-the-Spread-of-Misinformation/graph https://www.connectedpapers.com/main/f983a4e27b457a502fba322...