Re Trendism & cognitive stagnation approve

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Savage, Christopher" <ChrisSavage () dwt com>
> Date: May 29, 2018 at 1:49:51 PM EDT
> To: "dave () farber net" <dave () farber net>
> Subject: RE: [IP] Trendism & cognitive stagnation
>
> Dave,
>  
> For IP if you wish…
>  
> The post below seems to me to be (in a backhanded kind of way) a pitch for broad, general, even liberal-arts 
> education. 
>  
> Start with a given question, i.e., how we as a society or culture ought to handle [x] issue or controversy.  I 
> suspect a very wide range of cognitive space can be opened up by asking questions of the form, “How would [person’s 
> ideas] apply to this issue?  What might [that person] say about it?”  Then iterate those question using a list akin 
> to the following:
>  
> Robert Nozick
> John Rawls
> Edward O. Wilson
> Ayn Rand
> Milton Friedman
> Andrea Dworkin
> Martin Luther King, Jr.
> Margaret Atwood
> Friedrich von Hayek
> Jesus
> Janet Yellen
> Karl Marx
> Eleanor Ostrom
> Charles Darwin
> Lao Tzu
> Richard Feynman
> Ronald Coase
>  
> Of course one may add or subtract viewpoints as suits one’s own preferences and/or the nature of the issue at hand.  
> It seems to me unlikely that applying this approach would result in a dearth of viewpoints/ideas to consider.
>  
> As Herbert Simon famously remarked, when confronted with a glut of information, the scarce resource becomes 
> attention.  We need to train ourselves to devote a modicum of our attention to proactively considering how different 
> people/ different well-developed and well-articulated points of view would apply to any given issue.  It takes work, 
> but there you go.  Nobody ever promised us that thinking about stuff would be easy.
>  
> Chris S.
>  
>  
> From: Dave Farber [mailto:farber () gmail com] 
> Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2018 1:49 PM
> To: ip
> Subject: [IP] Trendism & cognitive stagnation
>  
>
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: John Ohno <john.ohno () gmail com>
> Date: May 26, 2018 at 1:01:26 PM EDT
> To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>, ip <ip () listbox com>
> Subject: Trendism & cognitive stagnation
>
> For the IP list
> Originally posted here: https://medium.com/@enkiv2/trendism-cognitive-stagnation-21c8e003df83
>  
> Trendism & cognitive stagnation
>
> (This is a follow-up to Against Trendism)
> Basing visibility on popularity is a uniquely awful version of ‘tyrrany of the majority’ because uncommon views 
> become invisible, even if, were they to start on an even playing field, they would become popular.
> In this way, it encourages mental stasis: since ranking is based on an immediate appraisal of how popular something 
> already is, and visibility is based therefore on past shallow popularity, there’s no room for rumination.
> This is NOT an attribute of ‘technology’ or ‘social media’, but an attribute of visibility systems based on immediate 
> ranking. Visibility systems based on ranking delayed by, say, three days, or with the top 25% most popular posts 
> elided, would be fine.
> Our capacity to imagine new possibilities is based largely on our familiarity with the bounds of possibility space — 
> we can only imagine views that are in the neighborhood of views we’ve heard expressed in the past. So, making the 
> already-unpopular invisible limits imagination.
> (There are hacks we can use to make it possible to imagine views nobody has ever held. We can make random 
> juxtapositions, impose meaning on them, and then figure out a justification for them — like tarot reading. Or, we can 
> merely iterate from some basic idea, getting more and more extreme, while internalizing the perspective of each 
> iteration as something someone could possibly believe in good faith. The former — the bibliomancy approach — is 
> common in experimental art, while the latter is typical of dystopian science fiction.
> But, these hacks are pretty limited. We need a starting place. If we’ve only heard mainstream ideas, we’re going to 
> have a hard time going off the beaten path with the dystopia approach, while we will struggle with the bibliomancy 
> approach because most ideas can only be made to seem reasonable with the help of other ideas. Getting into uncharted 
> territories with either of these approaches is difficult unless you’ve already filled out the middle of your 
> possibility space with other ideas, because in their absence you would need to independently reinvent them.)
> This is not a justification, in of itself, for banning metrics entirely. After all, this kind of exponential 
> distribution happens with ideas even without the use of popularity signifiers: ideas spread, and popular ideas have 
> more opportunities to spread. Trendism merely accelerates the process and widens the gap between the most popular 
> ideas and everything else.
> Sites like reddit use segmentation to prevent total ordering of popularity from dominating, although this ultimately 
> means that popular subreddits have a disproportionate impact on this total ordering when it is seen. Similarly, we 
> have seen piecemeal attempts to limit the effects of trendism for particular topics — the curation of trending topics 
> at twitter and facebook, for instance, or ad-hoc ranking demerits for particular tags on lobste.rs.
> However, we could be applying the measurements we already take to counteract trendism rather than accelerating it: 
> making popularity count less the higher it gets, removing overly-popular content entirely, boosting the visibility of 
> mostly-unseen content, using information about organic reach in sites like twitter to boost the synthetic reach of 
> people who don’t have many followers (instead of boosting the synthetic reach of the rich), systematically demoting 
> posts that comment on trending topics, spotlighting spotify tracks and youtube videos with zero views, and so on.
> Where trendism devalues the function of recommendation systems as novelty aggregators, these tools could be modified 
> to be anti-trendist, pro-novelty, and promote a cosmopolitanism that broadens our horizons in ways traditional 
> word-of-mouth never could. This is a unique capacity of recommendation systems over curators: recommendation systems 
> can recommend things nobody has ever seen, and can recommend them on the grounds that nobody has seen them.
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