Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information At this point, it feels like we have overwhelmingly more mediums to get to knowledge than actual valuable knowledge, at least in written form. Was it the only way that this attention economy cannibalized the age of information? |
On top of that, we got pop up ads, spam, and pages that are actively hostile to users intent.
The insult is far worse than you imagine.
I think eventually we need some kind of canonicalization in order to progress, in terms of knowledge/information organization, but I'm not sure if that's a doable in today's digital society.
All throughout history, the experts disagree with everything said before in a ten year cycle.
The the “Big Bang” for instance. It is junk science. It is fake news. The Big Bang stands for however it started and I have no idea, but wait, it must have gone something like this…
We’re always revising history, and disagreeing for decades over those revisions.
What would be a useful canonical fact? The weather? A sensor observation? A record of topical articles (all of them)?
It seems whatever you’re asking for needs every bit of everything, with an intelligent interface (curated, ranked, filtered, matched, and revision chronolized) for reviewing it.
What you need is a librarian cult, not less content.
Novelty and mass apatite are only eclipsed by the panicked reflex for survival.
Curation is the new art. Find outlets which themselves refine and distill, without disappointing.
Maybe it's just FOMO on information .
State is one thing, representing that state is another (we now hesitate to use the word “meta”).
Disposition toward that state is both a strategic imperative and the source of inferential bias.
What you seek are Authorities of Truth.
Like Wiki on blockchain consensus which both empirically records events in time series and mob debates their validity or relevance.
Human cognition is not as clean and clear regarding “facts” as you optimistically presume.
Information is the removal of uncertainty (or the resolve of potential to disparate state if you accuse me of anthropomorphism.)
If it does not “remove uncertainty” it is not information.
Information is not objective, it’s value lies in the mind of the evaluator.
The Truth is a perturbation of Objective Reality. The “truth” is the representation in mind. “Integrity” is the measure of consistency between these two.
And one more thing. The “democratic” mob is NOT a qualified curator of truths, only a barometer of widely disseminated integrity (which usually comes by undeceiving the self rather than agreeing with one and other.)
The exception to this is journalism, and maybe the problem is that information/knowledge sharing has been massively approach as if it were journalism.
Advertising was invented for classified ad buyers by newspapers. It has since adapted to each new medium that came along, radio, TV, signboards, etc and now all manner of internet properties.
With technical searches, carefully crafted search terms can locate useful information. However, I find that once I venture into more general realms, the majority of the results, no matter how detailed the search terms, are ads or content with masses of affiliate links, etc. That is, very low grade ore (information), effectively useless for knowledge building purposes.
If it wasn't for advertising revenues, sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and many others wouldn't exist. Most people would probably not choose to pay to access those sites.
I got the iphone 13 pro, and the 120hz screen lets me read more stuff more quickly. Have I benefitted towards my "life goal"? Probably not, it may have been a detriment.
An approximation to this goal can be found in the page of 'papers with code' where you can see the SOTA for a given set of problems (I've used for AI) so the question "what's the most performant model for face recognition" can be answer and keep track of over time. It may not be comprehensive and I can only account for it's AI coverage, but it resemblance some aspects of the general idea.
Also maybe if we limit the aspiration indexing statements whose veracity can change over time and be accepted by experts then we would only refer to that canonical reference instead of remaking the statement or questioning its veracity, might work (?)
I see this today in the exercise of making sure what you want to communicate (statements) has not been communicated before, but this exercise is not suitable if platforms reward repackaging information as content so there can be influencers/people profiting out of it.
We suffer from a mass delusion that once something is said and accepted, it represents the precipice of understanding.
It does not.
We must remake ourselves every generation. We must replicate, disseminate, corroborate. And reprocess.
This information processing is distributed, asynchronous, and working at a glacial pace in our minds.
Our human understanding is not what can be googled or found in a book, it is our working knowledge. For working knowledge, knowing must be worked. This produces endless distillations and specializations. There will be content creators for as long as there will be content consumers.
The popular ones will skew for modern relevance. The “good” ones will preserve faithfulness to barely knowable truths.
Cognitively it actually takes three years of familiarity before a mind has integrated an idea. And ten years to see the full consequences of that ideas integration.
We aren’t as individually competent and knowledgeable as we imagine. We need the churn, merely of highest available quality.