SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
It’s important that people—actual individuals—are doing the work for themselves to decide how exactly they want to group information together, because it’s this exercise that hones a person’s unique intuition. It’s personal intuition that gives a piece of information a unique shape to live in, and it's the many connected shapes that make Are.na
... See moreare.na • On Motivation
A university museum worthy of its name must become at least as much a laboratory as, say, a university library. An archive must become a place of teaching and hands‐on learning. The classroom must become a place of hands‐on engagement with the material remains of the past where the tasks of processing, annotating, and sequencing are integral to... See more
Todd Presner • The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0
Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in... See more
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of the... See more
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. ... The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective... See more
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal... See more
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Taleb’s notion of rationality-as-risk-management liberates “rationality” from conflicting sets of rhetorical expectations, and replaces them with a common set of market incentives .
Market incentives create the kind of consensus the information age demands, and also the kind of people who can tolerate it .
Mike Elias • Pascal’s Market
Before Clubhouse existed, Twitter created a proto-cult platform where aspiring cult leaders could build enormous audiences, disciples retweeted their messages, leaders blessed followers with public replies, and so forth. Instagram and TikTok have followed the Twitter model and minted new cult leaders and behaviors of their own.
But a few specific... See more
But a few specific... See more
The Information • Clubhouse and the Future of Cult-Driven Social Platforms
Immutability, as it turns out, is not always well defined. In the case of blockchain, it does not mean that the records can never be changed or rolled back. Blockchain trust is immutable not in a binary sense, but in a probabilistic sense. Distinguishing untrustworthy chains from the consensus is not an all-or-nothing decision. The more subsequent... See more