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Given our current, "engagement maximizing" news media/social media architecture it doesn't matter who stands up and speaks the truth and how well they do it and how many clicks they get. They will fail.

In the arms race for the public's attention that has been setup, by this clicks/views/likes/retweets/upvote based architecture, the incentive for thousand other voices to drown out the truth, to pander, to distract, to mislead has never been higher. And its not hard work. It attracts and props up the most hard working yet unqualified people on the planet.

Until the architecture changes and incentives for these people change, just expect more and more Brexit and Trump like events wasting everyone's time and energy.

Oh Geez! I work in Industrial Automation. I have had a front row seat to the gains made over the last 20 years that nobody ever predicted. I give factory tours regularly and most people with decades of experience have their minds blown at the efficiency gains in industrial processes.

It has nothing to do with violating physics. Its just about being part of hyper-connected systems where incremental change, is happening in a thousand different places along the entire assembly line that add up to huge gains that nobody can imagine individually.

Are we going to see things materializing at button press in an instant? No. But we are going to get damn close.

Replicators. Feels like no one watches Star Trek anymore. Those writers had more time to think about this stuff than most science labs and engineering teams imho.

You maybe right. It took about a 100 years of thousands of weavers playing with punch cards, trying to increase loom efficiency, before Joseph Marie Jacquard perfected it. Until that happened, inspiring Charles Babbage, mathematicians had not produced any worthwhile computational machines. We have probably the same problem in biology. We need thousands of people playing and producing work like this before we see major mastery at the cellular level.

NASA's WorldWind is a similar project for those interested - https://github.com/NASAWorldWind/WebWorldWind

docs - https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/web/

original interview - http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/astronomer-avi...

The difference is in the size of your Sales team.

Lot of open source projects would benefit, if they had dedicated sales teams contacting firms day in, day out talking about their features.

People who run IT departments in the Enterprise world or even small firms lacking resources to keep up, just pick tools and make software decisions based on who reaches out to them.

Invest in a sales team and you penetrate markets that don't spend time monitoring developments in the tech world which is really the majority of all orgs. Elastic has done that quite well and is reaping the rewards.

Religious institutions are in a very odd place these days.

They are on the front lines, in terms of contact with the weakest, poorest and most troubled members of society. They attract people who are suffering.

The growth and existence and passionate defense of religious institutions, despite all our advances, signal society isn't providing alternatives that perform the same function that contribute to well being and community.

The more religion gets attacked the less is focus on providing those alternatives. And those alternatives will come only with a deep understanding of what religion got right in dealing with human suffering.

Self organized learning classrooms - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upg8LlJZtas

These things take time. Your job is to make sure they are constantly reminded an alternate path is available. Thats it really.

It doesn't matter if the majority of them are struggling or rejecting things. All it takes is one of them to make a breakthrough. And then its like dominoes.

Once upon a time, most leaders hardly ever visited a gym or bothered about their health. Today it's a rare thing to find one that doesn't. That didn't happen overnight. The key is for them to see other leaders having success with the approach.

People do things they never thought they could only when they tell themselves the right story.

More than "coping" or "making it ok" it's how mountains get climbed. Try contributing to a story that gets someone to summit a mountain. It's much more fun and satisfying than analyzing a story.

"The only way" you are suggesting is not the only way.

Changing people's thinking and behavior, especially that of highly misguided characters in power, requires as Psychologist Marshall Rosenberg would say, choosing between Violence and Compassion.

Ideally for progress we want people to change the way they think about what they are doing, not spend their time defending it or how to get away with it. The latter being what we manage to keep doing.

This is where the choice of approach we take makes a huge difference.

Our Natural instinct is to choose violence, punishment, judgement, name and shame etc. We want to see heads role for suffering caused.

But this approach takes the focus off the suffering of the victim, and puts focus on how to cause pain to the perpetrator. It doesn't get perpetrators to change the way they think - to reflect. Instead they react - play defense, and spend their time and resources on avoiding and skirting punishment.

Think about this. Think about what Gandhi, MLK, Mandala did by not choosing this route. They didn't allow perpetrators to play that game. They showed us there is a big difference in outcomes when we tell a man - look at the pain you have caused VS you are <LABEL> and will be punished for the pain you have caused.

This ledger of harms concept is great, because it keeps focus on the suffering produced. It makes people in power squirm and reflect. Which is what plants the seeds of change. They will feel the need to change, just as the British Empire, US Govt or the South African govts did.

But as soon as you add punishment to each issue their focus will shift to self defense at all cost.

I am going to keep posting the ledger of harms - https://ledger.humanetech.com/

Until we see all the issues in one place like a github issue tracker, solutions will always be piece meal and confined to personal experience.

We need more issue trackers like this, so that people with solutions to one issue or another have some sense of the big picture. Also Big Tech cant weasel out of one issue by talking selectively about another.

Who knows, maybe one day we will get to proper integration/system wide testing for fixes to social issues...

Quite out of touch. No Russian I have ever worked with in the US has ever wanted to return to Russia. Russia has truly squandered their deep talent and potential over the decades.

While more than half the Chinese friends I made during grad school in the US after completing their PhD's or after getting work experience have returned home.

The results speak for themselves in the kind of companies the two countries have produced. There is no comparison between how Russia and China have treated their talent.

There is ofcourse more to it than that.

"Getting back up" after life knocks you down is a huge factor in their success. There are very few successful adults protected from life's blows given the competitive, cut throat world we live in. They all know something about getting thrown into deep holes and climbing back out.

However, I will say that a majority of successful adults, learn how to be resilient at the expense of the people around them.

Not because they are evil, but because no one has shown them better ways of how to handle situations they haven't faced before.

People don't realize how bad this used to be in the past. Nowadays we have much more access to info, better understanding of the right ways to "cope", better understanding of what to avoid, and the right people/environments that will pull one out of life's deep holes. It's nowhere near perfect but it's much better (if you have the resources as you pointed out).

In the past people were mostly just winging it. It's why you see a whole lot successful people who are also ruthless. And regret it towards the end of their lives as they tally the costs and see examples of better routes they could have traveled.

hmm I see what you are saying. Thanks.

Yup Matt Taibbi has a good book calling the news media - Hate Inc. They spend all their time stoking fears and amping peoples anxiety and threat perception, all to maximize engagement - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway

True. There are so many issues most people don't even realize until it hits them personally.

https://ledger.humanetech.com - to see the cumulative damage, engagement maximizing social networks/news media are doing.

What about blindness or deafness?

ledger.humanetech.com - good place to submit studies and view the cumulative damage, engagement maximizing social networks are doing in one place.

People need to see the diverse effects in one place, otherwise they keep reacting in defense, selectively to individual issues that are raised that don't necessarily effect them personally.

Think of it as an github issue tracker not about software bugs, but about the social issues being created.

Thanks for those posts. Learnt something. Hopefully one day we are better at producing this data for everyone at a personalized level.

caloric overflow pools in other parts of the body

So if you are saying its contributing to "increased mental clarity and engagement" but the overflow is causing issues over time, then does this mean its just about finding the right dosage/frequency to maintain high clarity levels?

I guess its more like there is no free lunch here.

I just saw that well written comment and was thinking it's a crazy thing - that an astronomer at a large gathering of astronomers, surrounded by so many interesting people, discussing so many interesting things, takes a timeout to go and post an elaborate comment on reddit.

What is that crazy need we have to put in work, for no great gain, to keep utterly random people around the world updated in real time of whatever is going on?

These days, I seem to stop myself reading the news article , just head over to the right forum, and look for such comments. It's like the news industry has become more or less irrelevant, other than in surfacing a list of headlines, which then seed my "find best comment" search algorithm.

I am glad you used the word trapped - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2017/07...

Lot of disruption ahead to be sure. The tech is getting better and faster at identifying issues. But this also means pointless/thoughtless interventions being done all the time.

If a 70 year old is 4 hours away from a natural death and the tech raises an alarm and pulls in a surgeon to do emergency surgery that keeps him alive in a bed for another 10 years. That's a bad outcome in my book. And it happens all the time almost in automated fashion. Producing more suffering not less.

Thats what happens when you put the metric maximizing corporate robots in charge. They keep things running hyper efficiently for no sane reason, other than the fact that it is the only thing they know to do.

After the iPhone 4 or 5 it's been going no where vision wise.

They really need to turn off the visibility of the like count next to every thought and utterance, and return social interaction to some semblance of what it used to be throughout history.

Making it a social norm to get everyone on the planet to score everything that comes out of a mind should be treated as a violation of the ability to think independent thoughts and express oneself.

Throwing this arbit feedback loop into social interaction has changed social interaction and behavior without any debate. The fix to revert it is simple.

That is the only thing that needs to be spoken about. Everything else is a just a symptom of it.

Agree. But I think global power dynamics have changed and with that military spending/militaristic posture will go down the way it did with the end of the British Empire or colonial powers of Europe.

If there is another triggering event like 9/11 (which kept the defense industry alive), it will be a real surprise to see the US muster a response the way they did in the past.

Les Moonves during the last campaign - "Trump may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS, most of the ads are not about issues. They're sort of like the debates, Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? The money's rolling in and this is fun. I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going"

Does anyone seriously think something has fundamentally changed about the media since then?

The arms race for peoples attention is as bad as it has ever been.

The media is trapped by that fact and will be busy searching for the next bunch of characters who can top the ratings Trump gave them during the last campaign.

Sadly Warren won't fit their requirements.

To change the robotic way the media is going to be behaving requires a radical change in the underlying architecture that drives their behavior.

The like/view/click/retweet/upvote counts train these people neuralnet style in pandering. The counts should really be hidden while retaining the buttons so people can still like/upvote etc allowing the popularity, relevance, aggregation algos to still run.

It will change behavior of the press. A lot of the mindless fixation on the most divisive and superficial news won't be justifiable. Now like robots they keep pointing at the counts to justify their coverage of pointless garbage.

Interesting. And makes me wonder what else we are missing and misunderstanding, as we waste so much time trying to express the complexity of the world in spoken language rather than math. Not just physics but in sociology, psychology, economics etc.

Faraday purely from experiments 30-40 years before Maxwell, intuitively understood electromagnetism. Nobody serious believed it because he didn't have the training to express it mathematically. Dyson is saying it took Physicists another 20-30 years post Maxwell to get it. So basically ~70 years wasted.