{"id":247,"date":"2015-01-19T08:38:34","date_gmt":"2015-01-19T08:38:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/?p=247"},"modified":"2015-01-19T14:58:34","modified_gmt":"2015-01-19T14:58:34","slug":"foundation-big-data","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/foundation-big-data\/","title":{"rendered":"Foundation And Big Data"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Internet has become the world\u2019s Sorting Hat<\/a>: it identifies, and increasingly defines, the subculture(s) to which people belong. Does your Facebook feed feature Mother Jones<\/i> or Fox News<\/i>? The Guardian<\/i> or The Telegraph<\/i>? GamerGate vs Social Justice Warriors. Civil libertarians vs. terror-thumping authoritarians. r\/parenting<\/a> vs. r\/childfree<\/a>. Second Life<\/a> vs. Digital Detox<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Such distinctions existed before the Internet, of course; but they\u2019re far sharper, and far more numerous, today. To quote<\/a> Balaji Srinivasan of Andreessen Horowitz:<\/p>\n

An infinity of subcultures outside the mainstream now blossoms on the Internet \u2014 vegans, body modifiers, CrossFitters, Wiccans, DIYers, Pinners, and support groups of all forms. Millions of people are finding their true peers in the cloud.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve argued before<\/a> that: \u201cThere is no such thing as majority mainstream culture any more. We are all weirdos now \u2014 thanks to tech.\u201d Instead, the Internet is fragmenting our society into constellations and galaxies of social bubbles<\/a>. Many are compatible with one another\u2013one can be both a CrossFitter and a DIYer\u2013but many others are mutually exclusive and\/or competitive.<\/p>\n

This is mostly a good thing. Once, government and media gatekeepers could define both \u201cmainstream culture\u201d and its acceptable language of discourse<\/a>; now, people can, rightly, ignore that kind of attempt to impose the values of the elite<\/a> onto all of society.<\/p>\n

However. It\u2019s OK to live in a bubble; but it\u2019s not OK to not know<\/i> that you live in a bubble, and\/or to be unable to communicate with the rest of the world. However awful and repressive \u201cmainstream culture\u201d may have been, it at least provided a common context for communication. In the world of the Great Fragmentation, this inability to talk to to people who don\u2019t share your bubble\u2019s assumptions is a growing \u2014 albeit often hilarious \u2014 problem.<\/p>\n

I give you this pearl of an example: the Reddit AMA of FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn<\/a>, whose government-bureaucrat-bubble language so infuriated Redditors that they downvoted all of Clyburn\u2019s answers into oblivion<\/i>, and birthed this superbly scathing comment<\/a>:<\/p>\n

This AMA looks to me like a political stunt to say something along the lines of, \u201cYeah, I went on that interweb thing and talked to the American people! We had discussions about everything from Net Neutrality to Eminem!\u201d \u2026 Your answer, which really fell flat in terms of answering the original question, was packed with buzz-words and fluff \u2026 You\u2019re working on making sound policies over a period of time? Excuse my french, but NO SHIT. That\u2019s not what that guy asked. That\u2019s not what the internet asked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Consider also this excellent blog post<\/a> from Fredrik deBoer, regarding:<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

the default code of today\u2019s online social progressives, which I like to call We Are All Already Decided. This is the form of argument that takes as its presumption that all good and decent people are already agreed on the issue in question \u2026 They have no ability at all to express themselves to those who are not already in their tribe. They say terms like \u201cprivilege\u201d or \u201cmansplain\u201d or \u201ctone policing\u201d and expect the conversation to somehow just stop, that if you say the magic words, you have won that round and the world is supposed to roll over to what you want.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Read the whole thing, it\u2019s terrific.)<\/p>\n

So: either our fragmenting subcultures will get better at speaking to those who don\u2019t share the same assumptions, or the inability to do so will amplify and accelerate that fragmentation, and we\u2019ll wind up with a society made of bubbles that don\u2019t understand, trust, or communicate with one another. (Any resemblance to the political culture in today\u2019s America is probably not coincidental.)<\/p>\n

Which puts me in mind of Meredith Patterson<\/a>\u2018s talk \u201cStrategies Without Frontiers<\/a>\u201c\u2013also strongly recommended\u2013which is (in part) about Toby Ord<\/a>\u2018s work<\/a> on the \u201csocietal iterated prisoner\u2019s dilemma<\/a>.\u201d (PDF)<\/p>\n

To oversimplify, this work takes the classic Prisoner\u2019s Dilemma<\/a> and expands it to a society of many participants, each with different strategies, who are aware of each other\u2019s actions. Imagine each participant as a subculture, and one can at least envision an (enormously complex) expansion of this approach into \u201csocial simulations\u201d to determine the most likely outcomes of the interactions between subcultures.<\/p>\n

If so, let\u2019s hope that the emergent properties of larger, more complex systems are very different from Ord\u2019s simplified model. Because in many of its simulations, Absolutists \u2014 those who reject all others who do not subscribe to their purity \u2014 eventually take over the world. (Mind you, \u201cAbsolutist is only really a tenable strategy when there is no noise in the players\u2019 information or actions. If there is a small chance of error in information or action, then Absolutists end up defecting on each other and can never break out of this.\u201d)<\/p>\n

I readily concede that this is all exceedingly handwavey. Moreover, Ord explicitly specifies that his work is \u201ca good model for small populations,\u201d not necessarily applicable to larger societies. But the notion that the fragmentation of our society into well-defined subcultures could lead to it being meaningfully modelled and simulated on a large scale is too appealing to ignore. Never mind Hari Seldon<\/a>: maybe Big Data can bring us Foundation<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0techcrunch.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Internet has become the world\u2019s Sorting Hat: it identifies, and increasingly defines, the subculture(s) to which people belong. Does your Facebook feed feature Mother Jones or Fox News? The Guardian or The Telegraph? GamerGate vs Social Justice Warriors. Civil libertarians vs. terror-thumping authoritarians. r\/parenting vs. r\/childfree. Second Life vs. Digital Detox. Such distinctions existed\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-web-fragments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions\/248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adriangrigoras.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}