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Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral
- andsoitis 1y agoThe internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data. data != information != facts != truth != knowledge
- diggan 1y agoSince we (humans) basically cannot even agree on what "truth" is, what "knowledge" is, or what even a "fact" is, it makes a lot of sense that all of those things would be different, since we there is no consensus on what they mean. We even have a whole field about it, epistemology, where people been arguing for millennia about what those things mean. Question is, what are you trying to say with that, and how does it relate to the quote?
- garylkz 1y agoFrom my totally biased understanding, truth is what groups of people agreed on, people believe what they believed in. Even though people agreed on the same thing, each of them would have different interpretation of the truth that they believe it, with certain levels of overlap.
- diggan 1y ago> truth is what groups of people agreed on But just because a bunch of people agreed on it, doesn't mean it's "absolute truth", like how doctors for a long time didn't want to wash their hand, because they didn't believe in germ theory. Countless of examples where we've ("scientists" and/or humans) all agreed on something, which later turned out not to be true. And believing that truth is just "consensus between people" would lead to people never trying to go against that, even if their truth seems more truthy than the "established" truth.
- garylkz 1y agoYes, it's truth as in "consensus" but not the absolute truth, and I don't think we are going to reach the absolute truth anytime soon. You're assuming that everyone will agree on the truth just because it's the "truth", but why do you think we no longer believe that earth is the center of world? There will always people who questions the truth and did research and study about it, discovers new observations of the subject and replace the existing if it convinced the majority. It's question that lead us closer to the truth (occasionally it does the opposite). That's why we made new discoveries, and that's why you are here questioning about the truthfulness of truth.
- the_af 1y ago> truth is what groups of people agreed on I would call this "consensus" or "mainstream knowledge", or something like that. Truth exists regardless of whether people agree on it. I suppose about some things we cannot ever claim we know "the truth", though in common speech we agree to call widely held beliefs as the truth, for simplicity's sake.
- garylkz 1y agoAh yes, that exactly
- RiverCrochet 1y agoI have a different take. The more that people cannot disagree with X, the more X is truth. This is separate from fiction and intentional misrepresentation of events. When you directly witness something happening with a few others, you can't disagree about what you saw, so that is high truth (assuming no intentional mispresentation). Of course sometimes even here you may not all have seen the same exact thing at the same exact time. Video of events tends to be up there as well. Of course I mean raw, unedited video and not edited clip-montages of stuff interspersed with commentary, opinions, etc. Even raw video is not guaranteed to be high or complete truth if it's omitting other things that were part of an event. When we get into things like testimony, opinions, second-hand accounts, anecdotes, and commentary, then we're in the world of low truth (and sometimes its complete absence) and a high chance of deception. Hence the need for heuristics, trust, narrative detection, asking who benefits, etc. Which may not arrive at any truth other than the direction someone is wanting you to go. Science is interesting because it's reports are a form of testimony, but specifically extending an invitation to be reproduced so it can be directly witnessed again. This alone makes it more trustworthy than things like "here's the testimony of a dead person we can't even talk to anymore" or "everyone seems to accept X so X must be true" - and that last one is dangerous today because many people use social media as a proxy for "everyone" but it's very easily manipulated.
- dinfinity 1y ago> Since we (humans) basically cannot even agree on what "truth" is, what "knowledge" is, or what even a "fact" is We technically can, but we don't. And _that_ is the problem. There is an unending stream of people blaming social media, Big Tech, phones (and apparently even 'the internet') for all our woes and even though there is certainly some blame to be put on the amoral profit-seeking companies, the real problem is the nature of humans. Each of us is a walking pile of zerodays and ancient legacy biological code, just waiting to be exploited. The only thing that is protecting us is a fairly effective but thin and fragile protective layer of cultural overrides and rationality. Barring genetic engineering those zerodays are going to be with us for a while. Instead of (or in addition to) trying to play whack-a-mole with the swiftly evolving technological environment and the companies leveraging it through regulation and public outcry, we should go all in on cultivating that protective layer. Many people I know are not addicted to their phones and many are able to determine what 'facts' are. The key is to make active choices in avoiding low quality shit and put in the effort to act rationally. But that starts with being taught how important that is and realizing that lacking it is a very dangerous deficiency in yourself. Blaming others and the outside world for being addicted to entertainment or being misinformed makes things worse. We should be screaming from all rooftops and in all classrooms that it is us. We need to change.
- actualwitch 1y agoI've been coming to similar conclusions, but trying to change human nature is an impossible task. Throughout history we saw time and time again how any attempt at it was met with overwhelming rejection. Even in movies there are plenty of examples of people choosing messy human life over enlightened unification. Being aware of the power your instincts have over you is a privilege of the few, and taking action against it is a Sisyphean task. It all feels futile because nothing will ever change, time is a flat circle and wheel of samsara will keep turning nonetheless.
- al_borland 1y agoThis seems to tie in with Musk's Razor, that the most entertaining outcome is most likely.
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoAnd look at what that did to that man's brain
- thesuitonym 1y agohttps://archive.ph/chPKD https://archive.ph/chPKD
- hshshshshsh 1y agoBecause there is no objective way to say whether something is a good idea or bad idea. It's always subjective.
- worldsavior 1y agoMaybe that's why religion exists, to make it objective.
- throwawayffffas 1y agoReligion disagrees on what is good and bad.
- tomrod 1y agoReligion derives its moral authority from mythology, existence, and consent. Nothing else. Whether that a religion espouses an alternative worldview in order for its leaders to justify actions that would normally not be justifiable is a big part of how we got into this anti-pluralist mess to begin with.
- nathan_compton 1y agoTo make it appear objective, I think you mean.
- lo_zamoyski 1y agoYour comment seems to contradict that claim.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hshshshshsh 1y agoI never claimed mine was a good or bad idea.
- 1y ago
- gabev 1y agoQuite a lot of em dashes for the New Yorker... [EDIT] Several commenters rightly noted that heavy em-dash usage is normal for the New Yorker (and common thanks to OS auto-replacement), so my “LLM giveaway” quip was off-base. Leaving this up for context—thanks for the corrections.
- gruez 1y agoYou realize that the reason why em dashes are so prevalent in chatgpt output is that they're present in the training data, ie. newspaper/magazine articles? I get being suspicious of em dashes in a reddit comment or whatever, but I'd expect em dashes from a professionally typeset publication.
- bee_rider 1y agoProfessionally typeset publications, or word documents, or regular Internet comments written by iOS users—it converts double-dashes to em-dashes automatically. I’m convinced most folks noticing this now just weren’t aware of the punctuation before they heard about it in the AI paranoia context. I’m also convinced a good chunk of Reddit comments are AI spam. But, I mean, we have to imagine anyone running an AI campaign knows to avoid the em-dashes by now.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoEven in a Reddit comment they’re not that strange. macOS and iOS automatically turn two dashes in to an em dash when typing, so a lot of posters are probably using them without even realizing it and another portion stumbled across that and thought “oh neat” and kept doing it. Same goes for smart quotes. So it’s just as likely that by spotting those features in a post you’ve found an Apple user as it is that the poster is an LLM.
- psunavy03 1y agoThe only people who think em dashes are a dead giveaway for AI are people who don't know how to write and whose grammar is too poor to use them properly.
- Aurornis 1y ago
- kethinov 1y agoThe TL;DR answer to this question is there is a lot of intellectual junk food out there and our monkey brains are pretty vulnerable to succumbing it just as we crave literal junk food and resisting those cravings is very difficult. If only we had GLP-1 agonists for our minds too and not just our bodies. In lieu of that, all we've got is the same as always: nurture your mind by cultivating a good media diet, a healthy skepticism that doesn't drift into reactionary contrarianism, and an openness to new information; especially new evidence that contradicts things you believe. ...Which is basically like trying to solve the obesity crisis by telling people to diet and exercise. It would be nice if we had a more effective tool or technique to help a larger percentage of people achieve it.
- nathan_compton 1y agoI think higher education could help with this if it was de-commercialized, which I guess is just another way of saying what you are saying. I constantly think about The Republic and Glaucon demanding pastries, fine food, etc and Socrates telling him that he can invent such a society, but it will be a society with a fever. I think capitalism, which is distinct, I think, from free markets, produces a society with a fever and in the grip of that fever everything which can be exploited will be.
- atodorov99 1y ago[flagged]
- Gerardo1 1y ago> when a discord server adopts some LGBTQ propaganda. There it is.
- atodorov99 1y agoCan you elaborate?
- oblio 1y agoHis point is that "LGBTQ propaganda" is just... human rights advocacy. They're just people and they need the same rights as others. Traditional societies just say: you don't exist, go away.
- FreebasingLLMs 1y ago[dead]
- sorcerer-mar 1y agoLowercase L "liberal" is more philosophical persuasion than a direct political one. It's certainly not a political party that's parallel to "republican." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism Liberalism is big because it's what liberated (parts of) eastern Europe from authoritarian poverty not too long ago.
- zabzonk 1y agoSeems to confuse the internet (machines communicating via IP addresses) and the web (sites communicating via HTTP). And I found it really hard to read - but that is perhaps just me.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoYeah, I don't think the audience of the piece was intended to be site admins. Since SSH and FTP to name a few) are alien concepts to the majority of the population, I think you're just going to have to allow for "Web" == "Internet" in common discourse.
- godsinhisheaven 1y agoThis, this is peak programmer speak. You sir, are dedidcated to THE TRUE NAME OF THINGS
- n4r9 1y agoJohn Stuart Mill in "On Liberty" wrote: > The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution and is allowed to survive until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it. I'm curious to know whether he'd still agree with that in the age of "fake news".
- bendigedig 1y agoIsn't that exactly what he's saying? There will be times and ages when it will be ignored but it will keep popping back up again and again.
- n4r9 1y agoI think he assumes that a certain quality of discourse will be maintained (or reappear), but it's not clear that that's true any more.
- oblio 1y agoThe thing is, we don't have a long enough time frame. People are generally sane, on average, but only when looked at on longer time frames. They really want progress. However, when you're in the middle of a revolution you don't really want to be there. Basically, probably the next generation will be able to tell how bad things really were and if by their time things are truly better.
- tass 1y agoThe dark ages were a time of much greater repression with worse consequences for non-compliance. It might be true that the current cycle of anti-intellectualism will continue beyond our lifetimes, but we’ve recovered from worse.
- adamc 1y agoI think that quality of discourse will continue to exist, but web pages may not be it.
- lanfeust6 1y ago"Abundance" agenda is a good idea, gone about as "viral" as those get.
- nabla9 1y agoOnly thing about it that has gone viral is the word. People project something into the word, the concept itself seems to have no wings.
- Aurornis 1y ago> It was simply that, when people who once functioned on a need-to-know basis were all of a sudden forced to adjudicate all of the information all of the time, the default heuristic was just to throw in one’s lot with the generally like-minded. This is what it comes down to, in my experience. Even many people who see themselves as rational arbiters of information will fall into the trap of aligning with people who seem to have the vibe they’re looking for, rather than examining the facts on their own. Lately I’m also interested in how people develop parasocial trusting relationships with podcasters, streamers, bloggers, or Twitter users that they really like and admire. I see it frequently in people who get attached to podcasters, I assume because it’s easy to grow attached to someone when you listen to them talk at you for hours every week. I even get in trouble (or downvoted, in HN context) when I point out that fan favorites like Andrew Huberman are known to peddle a lot of misinformation and misrepresent studies. The concept is unthinkable to Huberman fans, but it’s well-known to informed people outside of the bubble. Step into other domains and the same phenomenon occurs with Joe Rogan, or members of the current government. Some people get really attached to personalities and align with them, ignoring or shouting down any information that disagrees with their beloved personalities.
- the_af 1y ago> Even many people who see themselves as rational arbiters of information I don't think this is the default mode for most people. It wouldn't even make much sense. Some professionals, in some contexts, some of the time can act as rational arbiters of information. But not most of the time, nor in most contexts. That way only leads to these cultish sites like LessWrong, full to the brim of self-appointed rationalists holding the freakiest, most irrational beliefs (one of them being that they are "less wrong").
- Aurornis 1y agoThat’s what I was saying: People who see themselves as being extra-rational are often the same ones outsourcing their thinking to personalities they follow. Your example of LessWrong is perfect because the “rationalist” community is, ironically, home to a lot of irrational beliefs deeply held. I think their desire to feel like they’re going back to first principles and entertaining alternate theories leaves them especially vulnerable to people who know how to write prose that fits the rationalist mold. That’s why you see the “rationalists” getting involved with people like Moldbug, Curtis Yarvin, and other reactionaries.
- anthk 1y agoEDIT: wrong thread, sorry.
- ednite 1y agoWhile this article doesn’t directly mention ads or algorithmic feeds, in my opinion, the dynamic it describes feels deeply tied to them. The internet’s shift toward tribal, memetic behavior isn’t just cultural, it’s deeply structural and driven by how platforms make money from engagement. Feeds optimized for engagement and ad revenue naturally favor ideas that are fast, emotional, and identity-driven. The more transmissible the idea, the greater its reach. Slower, non-viral ideas don’t stand a chance in that environment. To me, the architecture of targeting and personalization isn’t just mirroring tribalism, it’s reinforcing and accelerating it. Maybe the future of meaningful discourse online isn’t about better moderation or more facts, it’s about redesigning the incentives entirely. Until we change what the system rewards, unfortunately, we’ll keep getting more of what spreads, not what matters.
- growlNark 1y ago> The internet’s shift toward tribal, memetic behavior I don't actually see the internet as very tribal at all compared to meatspace; in fact, I see it as one of the, if not the most, anti-tribalist force to have ever existed as a force in the general population. I just think it's hard to see sometimes through all the discourse about how many parts of the internet are built to manipulate us, and how starkly obvious and disturbing mob mentality is when you see it on a daily basis. But that's not, and never was, the majority of the behavior and interactions you're bound to run into unless what you like is fighting with people on social media. But even I, a bastard as cynical as anyone, can see how we managed and continue to manage to form relationships across nominally tribal boundaries in spite of not making anyone money. Of course the internet is memetic; but then again, so is all human culture I've ever witnessed. I think that's a neutral thing at worst.
- ednite 1y agoWell said. I’m just pointing out that platforms aren’t really designed to promote meaningful interactions, they’re designed to keep us engaged and clicking. And because of that, it’s hard for thoughtful, meaningful content to really thrive in that kind of system.
- excalibur 1y agoThe answers promised by the title are delivered in spades by the paywall.
- Barrin92 1y agoThis entire question to me seems really philosophically confused. The article already leans into the Darwinian framing of communication. i.e. "memetics", "the marketplace of ideas" and so on. I don't even know what's there to discuss, if that's how you have already agreed to see communication, then it's self evident that it doesn't produce anything good, or virtuous, or if it does at best coincidentally. Evolution and rabid competition, in any market, nature, information spaces doesn't have some Pollyannaish direction, isn't on some path to a truth or what have you. Memes aren't good, they're fit by definition. In a way this is just a really strange Anglo-American thing because there's this ideology of being both committed to civility and virtue but also unconstrained free markets and it doesn't really make much sense. This utopianism always had to come apart because there's no commitment to reason, truth, virtue inherent to "mimetic reproduction" and if you're willing to talk about it that way you should already know that to be the case.
- intended 1y agoYes, this Darwinian framing is the foundational to the ideas of free speech, especially as operationalized in American jurisprudence.
- _aleph2c_ 1y agoIt's cheap to build an AI-bot farm. It's cheap to build a network map with associated psychological profiles for each person in that map. It's cheap to buy an editor, and influence who is hired at coastal publications. There aren't natural viral movements anymore, it's all synthetic now: A battle-ground for warring oligarchs and intelligence agencies. The more you find yourself upset about something, the higher the likelihood that thing is part of a synthetic movement. Bad ideas go viral because someone has paid for them to go viral.
- vonnik 1y agoIt’s worth noting here, because Thiel comes up so much in the piece, that he works with Nadia’s husband Delian Asparouhov at Founder’s Fund. Also worth noting that group chats lends themselves to conspiracies. Real conspiracies that end up changing politics, and conspiracy theories fomented in the group and about the group. This is because they are a means of small-group coordination and concealment. There is something antimemetic about this article in general, and in a bad way. As Cheever said, “you can write about boredome, but you can’t make it boring.” Gideon is translating the world into an excellent undergrad English essay, but he is not telling a compelling story, as many memes do.
- alexpotato 1y ago> At times, Asparouhova suggests that antimemes are specific proposals, like the importance of extended parental leave, in perennial lack of a lasting constituency to sustain them. This particular line struck me given that I recently listened after listening to the Lex Fridman podcast with Cenk Uygur [0] Uygur made the following point: "More than 80% of the US voting population supports paid parental leave yet Congress won't vote on it/pass it. Why? B/c Congress has become captured by corporatism and it's not in the best interests of corporations to have paid parental leave" Earlier, there is this quote: > Why can’t we manage to solve these big, obvious collective-action problems? Why, in other words, can’t we have nice things? I wonder why people ask these questions, almost rhetorically, when the answer is that well organized groups have made conscious decisions and taken real action to modify government/laws etc to do this. e.g. if one group could do this, why don't more groups do this? (on a related note, the talk by James D’Angelo, “The Ghost Bill & The Cardboard Box” [1] about how Congress became more tied to corporations is fascinating) 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtPROVsePk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtPROVsePk (Lex Fridman) 1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qz27n1tNNMg (Ghost bill)
- kouru225 1y agoThere is definitely a hostile entity that’s in power and is purposely rejecting the wishes of the masses, but what the author is pointing out is that this entity took power by exploiting an inherent problem of communication: There are some ideas that function as antimemes because they have a natural barrier to entry. The hostile entity used the fact that our communication systems were built on top of an inherent trust in memetics in order to control the conversation, vaulting away important antimemes as a method of getting rid of functional and practical political action.
- juancn 1y agoThe issue is the same as always, once something goes massive, the statistics of human nature start to dominate. The abundant dissemination of information tends to average society. Note that local cultural differences have been slowly being erased. You travel now, and it's not as alien as it was 30 years ago, even languages are borrowing more from each other (why does Europe has so many languages? It was hard to talk to people a couple valleys away, not anymore). So, given that human intelligence seems to be normally distributed (we can argue about the measurements, but they all distribute normally), this averaging process takes us all toward mediocrity. Even taking algorithmic feedback into account, those also are trying to maximize engagement, and ultimately, that's also an average.
- kouru225 1y agoIt’s always great to find someone who’s been thinking the same as you have been, but took the time to formalize it. For years I’ve been calling these antimemes “natural barriers” or “lost truth” (lost in that it’s destined to be lost). I’ve bought the book and hope it goes into further depth because I’ve become very confident that this idea is an entry point into a thought train that ends up uncovering a metric shit ton of important ideas. From antimemetics we get a fundamental problem of all brain development, the subconscious in all its iterations and forms, the basis of religion, and the underlying meaning of all forms of storytelling. It’s a fascinating story that I’ve been trying to put together into one package for years now. It’ll be bittersweet if I find out someone did it better than me. Edit: one way I disagree with the author is that I don’t think memes are bad at all, and the reason why is because I don’t think the barrier between antimemes and memes is as sturdy as you might think. The process of storytelling and art is the process of encoding antimemes as memes, and the reason why the meme culture seems so violent and cynical these days is because our ability to engage with manifest meme content that have latent antimeme content (to use Freudian terms) was undermined by our older generation, who never properly grappled with antimemes and the implication of their existence to begin with, and therefore normalized the process of engaging with manifest meme content without acknowledging the existence of the latent antimeme content it was formed from.
- kouru225 1y agoOh jeez I just started this book and it’s terrible. The author seems like they front-loaded the real reason they’re interested in Antimemes, which is cause they have political opinions that they want to avoid the consequences of having to publicly admit, and then they go about molding the idea of Antimemes to formalize bad politics as a philosophy rather than actually explore the idea. The big schism in their thinking happens when they refuse to label legal contracts or math as Antimemes, which of course ruins the whole idea in the first place. In this authors eyes Antimemes are just normal memes that no one wants to admit to, which means they’re not functionally different from memes in any way besides the fact that the person engaging with them is a coward. In fact, this entire book just seems like a philosophical formalization of being a little scaredy cat, and it’s not even an interesting one like The Americanization Of Emily. You know how people are a product of their culture? Have you ever read a book from someone whose culture is so overpowering and yet so limiting? Thank god I never moved to San Francisco. I’m certainly not reading a book by someone who’s discovered a secret arcane truth underlying communication. I’m reading a book by someone who’s so deep in their safe space secret chat rooms that they’ve never had their ideas challenged or elaborated on once.
- johnea 1y ago> On the right, this manifested itself as various forms of xenophobia and a wholesale mistrust of institutional figures; on the left, as much of what came to be called cancel culture and its censorious milieu. Both were attempts to police the boundaries of us—to identify, in other words, those within our circle of trust and those outside of it. The author is describing a widely discussed trend, and using everything but the correct names for the two groups: wing-nuts and woke-nuts. Two sides of the same coin. The inter-networked hand-computer era has all but killed attempts at autonomous thought, and even the idea that pushing oneself toward intellectual autonomy is a good thing to do...