About

On top of all that, there’s the cultural convergence: because likes are a form of consensus, the fact that the most exposure goes to the most likes means we spend most of our time looking at the most generic artifacts of mass-appeal. Have you noticed that the music on the radio sounds hardly different than 20 years ago? That was not the case back i... See more

The difficulty of judging subjective interestingness has long held the attention of the field of open-endedness (https://www.oreilly.com/radar/open-endedness-the-last-grand-challenge-youve-never-heard-of/ ). Many ideas have been proposed and one of the simplest of those is simply to stop trying to assess and optimize interestingness. Instead, the i... See more

we’ve turned everything in life into a giant popularity contest–everything you say, everything you experience, everything you see, and even everything you feel–is a product of a giant worldwide counter of likes and follows. It’s a planet-wide exercise in objective convergence, a giant narcissism amplifier that cynically assumes that competing for m... See more