[HN Gopher] Seeing Like a Network
___________________________________________________________________
Seeing Like a Network
Author : yamrzou
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-09-19 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.strangeloopcanon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.strangeloopcanon.com)
| ljlolel wrote:
| Tower of Babel
| advael wrote:
| I think half of this is well-reasoned and insightful but it
| commits a couple of enormous confounds when trying to explain the
| general sense of stagnation
|
| One is the economic side of things. Like me, this author has a
| very US-centric view of things, and to be fair, much of the world
| often seems to. However, a crucial factor in the US economy now
| is inequality, concentration of power at the high end, and
| purchasing power and quality of life essentially rotting at the
| low end. The vast majority of people in the US do not give a
| single flying fuck about the GDP, and they are correct not to,
| it's become a useless metric for their purposes. Whatever the
| economists say about broad aggregates, a lot of people are
| struggling right now. The job market is chaotic and, for most
| jobs, less lucrative in real purchasing power. Even relatively
| educated younger people probably can't afford a house. Life
| expectancy has declined for the first time since we've been
| rigorously measuring it. Companies can just permanently and
| unilaterally raise the price of groceries or TV or crucial
| medicines because they operate as cartels. Your precarious job
| also provides your flimsy shield against the absolute nightmare
| that is ever dealing with the medical system. Even in the 2000s
| the average person could get bankrupted from a single medical
| emergency. But now that's still true except that's on top of more
| baseline precarity. A lot of this got muted by people being
| mezmerized by the density of the network increasing. Go to any
| living busy city and you will notice that happy people are not on
| their phones 24/7, but so many people are. You never meet those
| people IRL because of course you don't. I've met them. I seem a
| lot nicer in person. Some of the perma-online aren't as mean in
| person, but they also can't hold a conversation very well. Their
| life is online because that's what they can safely afford and do
| with their time. And as concentration of power has tried to
| squeeze more blood from a stone, as those goods and services we
| who touch grass also saw get shittier and more invasive and
| annoying, this further immiserated people for whom they were and
| still are more important
|
| Also, destabilization of the world is real. There natural
| disasters at unprecedented scale every year. There are huge
| migrant crises that come from people fleeing natural disasters,
| wars that indirectly result as resources become more scarce,
| pogroms that follow the wars, and this in turn leads to populist
| nationalism that stokes bigotry and has significantly
| destabilized the actual governments of several countries
|
| A lot of misery and paralysis are amplified by network effects as
| described in this paper. I'd even believe network density
| accounts for some of it on its own. But also, there is actual
| misery to be amplified at a pretty catastrophic scale right now
| for reasons that are not just because the internet. And moving to
| dense social medias concentrated by enormous corporate
| information-brokers is not some accident of history, those
| companies still make decisions that both maintain and exploit
| those network properties
|
| A good mathematical shiny object is alluring because it's fun to
| reason about and math seems so _powerful_ and it gets to have
| unambiguous truths that you can program about and so I think a
| lot of people find a mathematical model that looks explanatory
| and it dominates the picture for them. Maybe people are so upset
| because information propagates so fast and it 's all a blur. And
| like, again I partially buy that. I've felt that. Also, I think
| some people dark forest because sometimes internet drama
| escalates and finds their house and sends swat teams there. Maybe
| we could sparsify our networks, but we are still cranking lots of
| voltage through lots of nodes and many of the connections are not
| just missing but badly frayed and kinda sparking out and flopping
| about on the street
| flir wrote:
| Shades of David Brin, I think.
|
| But as far as the models go: the map is not the territory.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I took the graph pictures as metaphors.
| flir wrote:
| That's fair. I just don't think you can take observations
| about graphs and apply them to human societies uncritically.
| bbor wrote:
| This is a fantastically written post by someone whose blog title
| tells me we'd be friends, but it's also perhaps the most absurd
| example of idealogical bias I've ever seen. In this case, the
| bias is towards individualism and contemporary American
| conservatism/liberalism. Like; The histogram for
| the sparse network shows a wider spread of "world knowledge"
| values. This range and the standard deviation indicate a more
| varied distribution of information among nodes. While in the
| dense network, the uniformity of colour suggests that almost all
| nodes have closer "world knowledge" values. Information spreads
| quickly and uniformly, leading to a more homogeneous knowledge
| distribution among all nodes.
|
| Truth is good, my friends. They later describe this as leading to
| "echo chambers" and use some examples of fake news from the past
| to illustrate this, but I think this is entirely backwards. Echo
| chambers form in spare networks because that's, uh, that's what a
| chamber is. I won't go quote-by-quote because as I said above the
| analysis itself is good, but again and again they apply a biased
| worldview to end up focusing on the wrong results of that
| analysis. Probably the funniest quote is: In an
| era of unprecedented connectivity and access to information, we
| expected a renaissance of cultural innovation. Instead, we find
| ourselves in stasis, where the sheer volume of content has led to
| a paradoxical cultural gridlock.
|
| Just because you don't _like_ modern culture doesn 't mean it's
| not "innovative". Even if we restrict the analysis to English
| speakers in "the west"-ish, public opinion on gender identity,
| sexual orientation, public healthcare, international relations,
| parental labor division, neurodivergence, and open world games
| have changed considerably. Just to name a few important topics
| off the top of my head ;) And if we're talking _aesthetic_
| cultural innovation, I really don 't see a problem with the
| current internet other than "hollywood sucks" and "vine no longer
| exists"
| rsingel wrote:
| "We're stuck surrounded by the exhausts of the stories that
| pollute the epistemic commons and they together make up the much
| of the information sphere in which we live."
|
| Published, sans irony, on Substack
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-09-19 23:01 UTC)