Ask HN: Don't you feel attention economy has cannibalized the age of information
At this point, it feels like we have overwhelmingly more mediums to get to knowledge than actual valuable knowledge, at least in written form.
Was it the only way that this attention economy cannibalized the age of information? We never got to the information age, we got an age of paper emulation. True information weaves together many sources with a rich context. We never got the Memex, and it's been almost 80 years now. On top of that, we got pop up ads, spam, and pages that are actively hostile to users intent. The insult is far worse than you imagine. Even with some kind of memex, I think eventually information start to be repeated purposelessly. I think eventually we need some kind of canonicalization in order to progress, in terms of knowledge/information organization, but I'm not sure if that's a doable in today's digital society. Tell me a “fact” you want represented (or query pattern for finding one.) All throughout history, the experts disagree with everything said before in a ten year cycle. The the “Big Bang” for instance. It is junk science. It is fake news. The Big Bang stands for however it started and I have no idea, but wait, it must have gone something like this… We’re always revising history, and disagreeing for decades over those revisions. What would be a useful canonical fact? The weather? A sensor observation? A record of topical articles (all of them)? It seems whatever you’re asking for needs every bit of everything, with an intelligent interface (curated, ranked, filtered, matched, and revision chronolized) for reviewing it. What you need is a librarian cult, not less content. "The begining of the universe was the big bang" is an example of such fact. Now, this sentence can and must be reviewed but the index over "how did the universe began" would keep track of it in that hypothetical platform. So, until it's reviewal, the sentence can be recognized as canonical. An approximation to this goal can be found in the page of 'papers with code' where you can see the SOTA for a given set of problems (I've used for AI) so the question "what's the most performant model for face recognition" can be answer and keep track of over time. It may not be comprehensive and I can only account for it's AI coverage, but it resemblance some aspects of the general idea. Yes, just as reasons made an orgy of the age of reason. Novelty and mass apatite are only eclipsed by the panicked reflex for survival. Curation is the new art. Find outlets which themselves refine and distill, without disappointing. I see, one of the challenges I find there is that outlets overlap intentionally and partially and there's no incentive to only refer information to its canonical source. Maybe it's just FOMO on information . That is the chaotic aspect of Objective Reality. State is one thing, representing that state is another (we now hesitate to use the word “meta”). Disposition toward that state is both a strategic imperative and the source of inferential bias. What you seek are Authorities of Truth. Like Wiki on blockchain consensus which both empirically records events in time series and mob debates their validity or relevance. Human cognition is not as clean and clear regarding “facts” as you optimistically presume. Information is the removal of uncertainty (or the resolve of potential to disparate state if you accuse me of anthropomorphism.) If it does not “remove uncertainty” it is not information. Information is not objective, it’s value lies in the mind of the evaluator. The Truth is a perturbation of Objective Reality. The “truth” is the representation in mind. “Integrity” is the measure of consistency between these two. And one more thing. The “democratic” mob is NOT a qualified curator of truths, only a barometer of widely disseminated integrity (which usually comes by undeceiving the self rather than agreeing with one and other.) Do you mind sharing references to read more about the approach in which you are framing the problem? Also maybe if we limit the aspiration indexing statements whose veracity can change over time and be accepted by experts then we would only refer to that canonical reference instead of remaking the statement or questioning its veracity, might work (?) I see this today in the exercise of making sure what you want to communicate (statements) has not been communicated before, but this exercise is not suitable if platforms reward repackaging information as content so there can be influencers/people profiting out of it. I think you’re going in the wrong direction. We suffer from a mass delusion that once something is said and accepted, it represents the precipice of understanding. It does not. We must remake ourselves every generation. We must replicate, disseminate, corroborate. And reprocess. This information processing is distributed, asynchronous, and working at a glacial pace in our minds. Our human understanding is not what can be googled or found in a book, it is our working knowledge. For working knowledge, knowing must be worked. This produces endless distillations and specializations. There will be content creators for as long as there will be content consumers. The popular ones will skew for modern relevance. The “good” ones will preserve faithfulness to barely knowable truths. Cognitively it actually takes three years of familiarity before a mind has integrated an idea. And ten years to see the full consequences of that ideas integration. We aren’t as individually competent and knowledgeable as we imagine. We need the churn, merely of highest available quality. “If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.” -- Carl Sagan Agree, also at this point I feel like there are more books/posts/content than useful combinations of words :/ The exception to this is journalism, and maybe the problem is that information/knowledge sharing has been massively approach as if it were journalism. I agree that we need Journalism as in reporting on current events, as it appears that we are drowning opinion-editorial content It's all about advertising revenues. Advertising was invented for classified ad buyers by newspapers. It has since adapted to each new medium that came along, radio, TV, signboards, etc and now all manner of internet properties. With technical searches, carefully crafted search terms can locate useful information. However, I find that once I venture into more general realms, the majority of the results, no matter how detailed the search terms, are ads or content with masses of affiliate links, etc. That is, very low grade ore (information), effectively useless for knowledge building purposes. The algorithm values content more over information. Good information is expensive. When's the last time you paid money for content on the internet? There are lots of pay-walled sites, that serve up information of dubious quality and provenance. Which in turn makes it a crap shoot when it comes to sites that appear to have useful information and ask for payment. If it wasn't for advertising revenues, sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and many others wouldn't exist. Most people would probably not choose to pay to access those sites. Yeah because creating new valuable information takes attention, and we are having attention sapped from most due to the addictive smartphones and technologies that are always with us and super performant. I got the iphone 13 pro, and the 120hz screen lets me read more stuff more quickly. Have I benefitted towards my "life goal"? Probably not, it may have been a detriment. Agree! Also even if valuable information were created more frequently eventually we're just repeating ourselves. It'd be ideal an index of canonical info/knowledge for example. How does a 120hz screen allow you to read faster? You can blink faster Doug Engelbart in the 1960s would’ve expected that we, in 2022, would have computers that will just immediately present us with the exact answer that we are looking for. That will do all of the searching and filtering and refining for us. That will ask us to clarify our question if it is ambiguous. And that will immediately tell us if the question we have asked is one to which humanity has yet to find an answer. The computer would help us be more efficient with our tiny brains. To allow us to focus on processing what is worth processing. And that we can focus our explorations on the areas that haven’t been explored. Not at all. We now have access to a waste universe of information. The trick is to filter out the noise. For example, I am watching talks on YouTube by world class experts in metabolism from the comfort of my own home. Without the internet, I would have to fly to another country to watch talks at that level of quality. However there are also a waste number of pseudo-science videos on YouTube. So you have to carefully filter out the signal from the noise. It’s a bit annoying but absolutely worth it.