Why Good Ideas Die Quietly and Bad Ideas Go Viral

Yes and no, and I’m going to constantly plug network propaganda because it’s the easiest way to point this out. I suppose the shorter version is to hear out the section where Rob Faris speaks in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGTmuHeFdAo.

The very clear finding is that the issue isn’t the algorithm its in the information production systems on the left+center vs right.

On the right, crucially - sense is made by first having a narrative, getting it amplified by major voices, and then seeking out facts to support it. Counter views do exist, but they dont get amplified.

On the Left+center we have your typical media and information economy which we think everyone is a part of. Ie you get punished for having the facts wrong or being inaccurate.

The right is about looking like they are smart, but primarily about selling narratives.

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There IS also a problem with the algorithms, in that it creates a fitness function that highly emotional and engaging content survives better than boring and long form content.

Or more precisely, highly emotional and engaging content spreads more.

But since reach, time on site, etc, are linked with advertising revenue they are essentially conflated with economic viability.

The exact linkage though, is a change in the content consumption mix of humans.

Humans have only N hours of content they will consume in a day, and some % of that time will be allocated to high cognitive load, kinda-boring content.

Your market will be smaller, but there is a sliver of a market that does exist.

It’s just that the effort to payout here, is not as effective as making content that gets more views.

Yes, it describes the same process, just with extra steps, but each of these steps is a different place which can be approached to alleviate the issue of engagement vs accuracy.

> The internet’s shift toward tribal, memetic behavior

I don't actually see the internet as very tribal at all compared to meatspace; in fact, I see it as one of the, if not the most, anti-tribalist force to have ever existed as a force in the general population. I just think it's hard to see sometimes through all the discourse about how many parts of the internet are built to manipulate us, and how starkly obvious and disturbing mob mentality is when you see it on a daily basis. But that's not, and never was, the majority of the behavior and interactions you're bound to run into unless what you like is fighting with people on social media.

But even I, a bastard as cynical as anyone, can see how we managed and continue to manage to form relationships across nominally tribal boundaries in spite of not making anyone money.

Of course the internet is memetic; but then again, so is all human culture I've ever witnessed. I think that's a neutral thing at worst.

These so-called "tech" companies would have people believe that "this is what people want" and they are just giving it to them. But if people want something that has little to no value in the online ad services business, and there are countless examples of such things, then the so-called "tech" companies may refuse to deliver it, or more likely, they may choose to rearrange what is delivered such that the content most useful to the online advertising services business is delivered first and displayed prominantly, with the rest hidden or difficult to find. Several days ago there was an HN comment arguing that the www needs curation. The www has "curation". This is performed by so-called "tech" companies operating as unnecessary intermediaries in the inteerests of collecting data and selling online ad services. Maybe this is not of the kind of "curation" that www users want. It is "curation" (or "filtering", "moderation", or what ever one choose to call it) nonetheless._

To use a silly analogy, consider billbooards. Billboard companies may be useful for their role in information distribution. The public pays nothing for this "service". But billboards are not free. Advertisers pay to use them. The information displayed on billboards is generally commercial in nature. The public pays for roads, not the billboard companies. The public does not drive on these roads to see billboards, the roads have other, more important utility. The billboard companies piggyback on a public resource: roadways.

The www and the internet in general has utility other than as a medium or vector for collecting data surreptitiously and disseminating advertising. Silicon Valley's so-called "tech" company intermediaries offer "services" that make the internet "easier to use" and are marketed as "free". But like billboards, the intermediaries' computer systems are not free. Advertisers pay for these ad services systems. The public pays for the internet to which they connect and use as a medium//vector. The intermediaries piggyback on a public resource: the internet.

Perhaps the public has forgotten the utility of the internet without advertising. Trillion dollar "billboard companies" have made the public forget about the public resource that they are paying for. Imagine if, pre-internet, every road was lined from start to finish with billboards and billboard companies tracked drivers everywhere they travelled.

The roads work fine without billboards. The internet works fine without advertising. But the online advertising services industry, the trillion dollar "billboard companies", i.e., Silicon Valley, disagrees.

Isn't that exactly what he's saying? There will be times and ages when it will be ignored but it will keep popping back up again and again.

There’s been many examples recently. A very public one was that Covid was likely from a lab leak. There were many institutions and government figures that worked to oppress that, but now most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis.

Truth will still act. It will act in terms of competitive advantage, technology and the like. The manipulation of nature in any way is a source of power. It's just that such a source can sometimes be very small (e.g. there's a lot of math I won't use but I know about it). I suppose truth will act when relevant.

Currently it's acting in a way where you can read this message. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be true in order for you to read what I write (e.g. computers working, internet working, electricity flowing, etc.).

On a long enough time horizon, we are all dead.

In my view, Mills (and Holmes) did not imagine someone winning in the market place of the ideas, because they found an infinite money glitch.

Your information goods you produce, are losing in the market place of ideas, not because of their quality, but because

1) You are blocked from selling them into a market of customers on the right. 2) they are too expensive compared to the alternatives available.

Take the intelligent design movement and how it was platformed by Fox News, as “schools should teach the controversy about evolution”. Implying that evolution isn’t “solid science”, and that ID was a potential answer for this issue.

Or take how fox platformed cranks and bad science on environmental issues, allowing R senators and congress people to point to it, and stop pro-environment actions and bills.

The posture of science at the time was to not engage with cranks, because “dont feed the trolls”.

Shocked by the outcomes, scientists went on Fox, hoping to engage with the audience and explain their points - only to be peppered with gotchas, rhetorical tricks and arguments that made for good TV.

Crucially, the underlying sentiment was to ridicule experts and destroy faith in the “liberal” institutions that were crushing conservative views and cultural ability.

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These are examples to illustrate that the people who are playing the market place of ideas have financialized it. They are not in it for democracy, they are not in it, to engage in actual commerce of ideas

They are in it to break it. The job of members on the side of accuracy and science and evidence, is to understand it, realize the errors in their assumption, and to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity that inefficient behavior must create.

The cost of production of your facts and ideas, makes you more expensive and less useful, than the content being produced and subsidized on the right.

Be cheaper, be more useful, break the embargo, be financially viable, and/or institute regulation that prevents the creation of idea monopolists.

Either Participants that do not have to compete on the merits of their ideas, but on their ability to subsidize their media efforts, must be made uncompetitive in the market place of ideas.

OR, we must accept that there is an unavoidable fail state at the intersection of human neurology and Laissez faire information economies, and deal with that.

The truth is the truth, and it doesn't matter what people believe. The truth is still the truth, even if nobody existed.

I think with the linguistic turn the idea of a "correct opinion" feels a bit archaic. Sure, if you can truly glean the semantics and connotations of the language, you can feel confident their view is coherent, that they cohere with your views, etc, perhaps you can call their opinion correct in that agreement tends to be seen as correctness in a posteriori terms. But in practice, establishing that degree of confidence requires a shared linguistic background and skepticism. Especially when you're dealing with floating signifiers, as Locke tended to do (and as many respectable philosophers have done).

Plus, Locke seems to have generally existed outside the concept of being paid for eyeballs. I am not sure much of his philosophy survived the rise of capitalism, which is perhaps why he still remains such a strong voice—we are simply aware on some level of what liberal idealism has lost, and we want it back.

Personally, I think "truth" is actually a pretty weak concept and I have none of the attachments that enlightenment thinkers had to it. Even in good faith confidence about how other folks view concepts that are very real to us can be hard to come by. Am I sure that there the continent of Africa is not a conspiracy theory? Yes, I'm pretty sure. Well, what about the characterization of XYZ conflict? Or about the social value of idk role models with raising children? That's where newsrooms lose me—the terms are just too vague, the connotations too difficult to hold editors accountable for, for "truth" to be a real concern.

Since we (humans) basically cannot even agree on what "truth" is, what "knowledge" is, or what even a "fact" is, it makes a lot of sense that all of those things would be different, since we there is no consensus on what they mean. We even have a whole field about it, epistemology, where people been arguing for millennia about what those things mean.

Question is, what are you trying to say with that, and how does it relate to the quote?

There is definitely a hostile entity that’s in power and is purposely rejecting the wishes of the masses, but what the author is pointing out is that this entity took power by exploiting an inherent problem of communication: There are some ideas that function as antimemes because they have a natural barrier to entry. The hostile entity used the fact that our communication systems were built on top of an inherent trust in memetics in order to control the conversation, vaulting away important antimemes as a method of getting rid of functional and practical political action.

Oh jeez I just started this book and it’s terrible. The author seems like they front-loaded the real reason they’re interested in Antimemes, which is cause they have political opinions that they want to avoid the consequences of having to publicly admit, and then they go about molding the idea of Antimemes to formalize bad politics as a philosophy rather than actually explore the idea. The big schism in their thinking happens when they refuse to label legal contracts or math as Antimemes, which of course ruins the whole idea in the first place. In this authors eyes Antimemes are just normal memes that no one wants to admit to, which means they’re not functionally different from memes in any way besides the fact that the person engaging with them is a coward. In fact, this entire book just seems like a philosophical formalization of being a little scaredy cat, and it’s not even an interesting one like The Americanization Of Emily.

You know how people are a product of their culture? Have you ever read a book from someone whose culture is so overpowering and yet so limiting? Thank god I never moved to San Francisco.

I’m certainly not reading a book by someone who’s discovered a secret arcane truth underlying communication. I’m reading a book by someone who’s so deep in their safe space secret chat rooms that they’ve never had their ideas challenged or elaborated on once.

Yes, this Darwinian framing is the foundational to the ideas of free speech, especially as operationalized in American jurisprudence.

> Even many people who see themselves as rational arbiters of information

I don't think this is the default mode for most people. It wouldn't even make much sense.

Some professionals, in some contexts, some of the time can act as rational arbiters of information. But not most of the time, nor in most contexts. That way only leads to these cultish sites like LessWrong, full to the brim of self-appointed rationalists holding the freakiest, most irrational beliefs (one of them being that they are "less wrong").

Yeah, I don't think the audience of the piece was intended to be site admins. Since SSH and FTP to name a few) are alien concepts to the majority of the population, I think you're just going to have to allow for "Web" == "Internet" in common discourse.

This, this is peak programmer speak. You sir, are dedidcated to THE TRUE NAME OF THINGS

Only thing about it that has gone viral is the word.

People project something into the word, the concept itself seems to have no wings.

I think higher education could help with this if it was de-commercialized, which I guess is just another way of saying what you are saying.

I constantly think about The Republic and Glaucon demanding pastries, fine food, etc and Socrates telling him that he can invent such a society, but it will be a society with a fever. I think capitalism, which is distinct, I think, from free markets, produces a society with a fever and in the grip of that fever everything which can be exploited will be.

This, ironically, is an objectively bad idea.

In game theory and mechanism design, there exist dominant strategies. This is an objective truth, and exercising the dominant strategy is objectively better than not.

The earth orbits the sun. This is an objective idea. Fighting against the notion is objectively a bad idea.

Elephants shouldn't come in my house. I value it not destroying things in my home, etc.

You shouldn't deliberately reuse GUIDs as an IDs for things that are different.

Relativism is certainly something that exists, but it shouldn't be universally applied that all ideas are of equal value in all situations.

Socially, sure, use relativism when listening to ideas before coming to a consensus. That doesn't mean all ideas work, only that all ideas are given the same treatment. But bad ideas exist, as do good ideas.

Any untrue/invalid idea is bad. So it is not always subjective. “Tigers are friendly pets and every apartment in SF should have one” is an obviously bad idea.

Jumping without a parachute (and even with it; nor other factors that will slow you down or cushion the fall, etc) from 300m onto hard concrete is a bad idea.

You are welcome to test the opposite hypothesis, please send postcards from after the jump.

It takes one minute of thinking about the secondary effects of an idea to show this is an awful take.

For example, legalizing sports gambling. It's a good idea in that it makes obscene amounts of money. It's a bad idea in that it exploits a known pathway to addiction, moving money from being spent productively to an exclusively extractive endeavor. Not to mention the other secondary effects of how sports are presented to benefit the sports gambling apps.

Generally it's a net loss except for the company that operates the apps.

This can be applied across a lot of "products" in the tech sphere. app-based payday loans, AI "art" that exploits a common denominator of critical thinking and reduces the quality of art across the board.

Sure the live action Lilo and Stitch made tons of money, but the color grading is dogshit, they removed several important pieces of cultural commentary that was central to the plot, etc all to cash in on children who literally don't know any better.

It's literally more profitable to push slop than it is to put any effort into creating anything. So if "good idea" means it makes money, what incentive is there to create anything above the low "slop" bar? Why do we have to see everything degrade for the sake of profit?

That's what a bad idea going viral is. It doesn't have to be good to get attention. Kids running through people's fences gets attention.

Your comment seems to contradict that claim.

Maybe that's why religion exists, to make it objective.

And look at what that did to that man's brain

LLMs use em dashes because they’re in a lot of writing. They didn’t invent the concept.

I had to stop using em dashes in my own writing because it triggers people who never really thought about them prior to reading about their association with LLMs.

The only people who think em dashes are a dead giveaway for AI are people who don't know how to write and whose grammar is too poor to use them properly.

You realize that the reason why em dashes are so prevalent in chatgpt output is that they're present in the training data, ie. newspaper/magazine articles? I get being suspicious of em dashes in a reddit comment or whatever, but I'd expect em dashes from a professionally typeset publication.