[ExI] NYT ninny

[Jef Allbright]

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 12:37 AM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> The endless stupidity is breathtaking:
>
>  <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13brooks.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=login>
>
>  <Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to
>  have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.>
>
>  What, like <bricks are not merely small and oblong. Instead, opera
>  houses seem to be round and enormous.> ?

I too noticed that article in the Times and felt sadness and fear that
the disease afflicting nearly all of television is already spreading
to the remaining bastions of public thoughtfulness.

And it's more generally worse than that.  In my work, I process daily
thousands of items of news and information at the intersection of
technology and society, first classifying and sorting according to
relevance and salience.  A little over a year ago, an item in a blog
carried significantly greater (statistical) authority than an item in
an email discussion list.  Now there's almost no probable difference.
When YouTube was young, the likelihood of a video being interesting
(subjective, of course) was much higher than now, and at least one
researcher is using comments posted on YouTube as a reliable corpus of
inanity.  When the WWW was young, the mere existence of a page was an
indicator of probable salience, then it became necessary to rank
according to higher-order links, and now search engines like Google
work ever harder and deeper to distinguish mere popularity from
content with depth AND coherence.

Of course the extropy discussion list and its cousins are not immune.
Looking back over more than ten years on this list, who would deny the
decline in meaningful, leading edge content?

As we move toward an increasingly attention-based economy of
information, smarter tools help, but smarter forms of organization
help more.  From village gossip, to newspapers, to SIGs and email
lists, to blogs and their feeds, to agent-augmented collaborative
filtering, to ... what next? And pragmatically, how do we apply
information -- ever more effectively -- to growth in the direction of
our evolving values?

I catch myself feeling frustrated with the increasingly effective
production and dissemination of "stupidity", still reeling with the
realization that studies show 50% of the population are below average
intelligence(!), and then remember that the same tendencies that raise
the peak of the distribution also lengthen the tail.

I'll gladly give up the popular peak (to Brittney, Oprah, and yes,
even the New York Times) while I'll give a lot for increasingly
effective exploration. What really frustrates me is not the ignorance
of the masses, but the dissipativeness of the cognoscenti.

- Jef