> Look COVID proved that humans REALLY do not need to work. Like seriously, if everyone stopped working tomorrow it would be FINE.
I know you're probably being exaggerative in this statement but to add some clarity: COVID proved that most people's jobs are pointless (more or less), however, there's maybe like 10-15% of the workforce that if they didn't work, everything would come crumbling down and society would fall apart. Examples we saw during COVID: Medical staff (nurses, doctors, EMTs), truck drivers, train operators, agricultural workers, electricians & energy workers at power plants, waste management workers, construction workers, various retail employees (grocery store, pharmacies).
As to your point, humans with copious free time leads to civil unrest - so the fact that 80+% of people's jobs aren't critical to the functioning of the country is quite concerning - especially now with the recent advances in AI. Another concerning thing is that countries with high unemployment rates (20%+) typically have revolutions or similar. We've also never seen what 80% unemployment (or even 50%) looks like in a country not during a time of war or during a natural disaster. During those times extreme unemployment rates are seen as temporary by the population, whereas, with unemployment caused by AI - it won't be viewed as temporary so I think it'll spark a revolution pretty quickly because people won't see a light at the end of the tunnel and immediately call for change.
> Is that what people actually want? To be algorithmiclly fed content from strangers? Why is this the imputed ideal?
I never made the argument that it's the imputed ideal. Rather, my point is that in the context of a social platform, having an option for an algorithmic feed leads to other people with opposing views to discover the content and have dialogue about it/contest that viewpoint. Otherwise, it's a closed loop system that contains only like-minded viewpoints that can lead to an echo chamber. How do we prevent echo chambers from forming? Well, the most straightforward option is to introduce opposing viewpoints. How do we introduce opposing viewpoints? Well the people with opposing viewpoints need to be able to discover the content - so it needs to be shown to them somehow. The best way to do that (right now at least) is through an algorithmic recommendation engine.
> Is there any evidence that this is true or should be an expectation? Is that really why billions of dollars are spent on this space?
That's why I said "ideally". There's huge differences in algorithms for all the major social platforms. Algorithms can easily be used to make echo chambers worse, but algorithms can also be used to reduce echo chambers on a platform. To your point, that's why billions of dollars are spent on this because it's a complicated problem. One thing is a fact though, dissenting opinions create engagement and keeps people on the platform. If you responded to my comment and said "I agree with you", I wouldn't be commenting here right now and back on Hackernews. Most social platforms take advantage of this feature of our human psyche to get people to stay on the platform to then show them more ads and drive more ad revenue. That's why engagement is such a critical factor in social media algorithms and also has the unintended consequence of promoting controversial content - because it receives the most engagement. Which goes back to the need of having an algorithm that can balance reducing echo chambers by showing the content to others with dissenting opinions without unintentionally promoting only the most controversial content because it has the highest engagement. There's really no easy answer to this and again, that's why they spend billions like you said.
Your email inbox isn't an echo chamber because it's not a social platform.
According to this research study, these are the two main ingredients:
1) Homophily in the interaction networks
2) Bias in the information diffusion toward like-minded peers
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2023301118
Substack Notes is their way to venture into the social platform realm, which differs from the personal email inbox model, which isn't a social platform. With that in mind, for ingredient #1: people can only see notes from people they follow. People will overwhelmingly only follow people that align with their ideas/political leanings/beliefs. This creates the homophily in interaction networks. For #2, users can easily share biased information to their like-minded peers without pushback/opposing views since their social network is comprised of people with the same viewpoints.
To be clear, algorithms can definitely create echo chambers as well but ideally an algorithm based feed will promote discourse and dialogue about ideas.
An anecdote: I follow quite a few people on TikTok that post about housing policy in NYC. TikTok's algorithm exposes these videos to people with varying viewpoints, which creates a ton of dialogue on proposed solutions and pushback on ideas that could potentially harm certain demographics/historical areas, etc. This pushback is very important but is only possible when there is a chance for those with opposing views to discover it, which means there needs to be an algorithmic recommendation feature.
If TikTok had no FYP and instead people could only watch videos from people they follow, this would create a closed loop system and those opposing views for housing policy would not be nearly as prevalent.
Completely agree with this. This is basically the perfect formula for creating mini echo-chambers. If Substack wants to make this a real competitor to Twitter, it needs to have the "two feed" set up that both TikTok and Twitter have: a feed for algorithm-based recommendations and a feed solely for people that the user follows. They also need to make it so that you can follow someone's notes without also following their newsletter.
I've been trying to find a solution to this exact problem. I use Notion as my PKMS and I've been struggling to find an integration to make flashcards with my content in Notion. Going to try out your system - thanks for sharing!
As an aside, Notion would completely disrupt the flashcard app space (Quizlet, etc) if it had a feature to create flashcards from a Notion database with spaced repetition. I really don't think it would be that difficult for them to implement that feature. Hopefully they will soon.
I just created my first song using automatic real-time pure intonation and uploaded it yesterday[0]. I used a plugin called Scale Breaker[1] that connects to MPE instruments in Ableton (used Wavetable for all the synths in the song since it's MPE enabled) and set the tuning to automatic Just Intonation (12T) with 5-limit symmetric aug 5th tuning. I edited all the bass notes to trigger the correct tuning for each chord so each note is automatically microtuned to be perfectly resonant.
I make House music and noticed that not many people have been experimenting using real-time just intonation in the genre so I gave it a go to see what it sounds like - it was pretty fun to make. I believe perfectly resonant music is going to be really big in the next few years now that these automatic tuning plugins are available.
Question: does your plugin work through modulating the notes using MPE? My understanding is that this method allows for more versatility.
Love the site. Really great work with it. I had an idea for a similar site, but instead it would essentially be like Pinterest in which you indicate your interests/hobbies and it shows you forums related to those. There's dozens of small forums that I discovered off the 2nd/3rd/4th page of Google results that are super helpful - but hard to find.
How did you go about finding the ~3000 forums? That's my main hurdle with the idea.