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The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

christianheilmann.com

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Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#151

Post by QuasarOne »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #27
Tenoke wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also used to be confidently wrong all the time before the internet was ubiquitous, except then it was hard to quickly verify they were.

True, but a difference is that they could not spread their confidently wrong opinions globally, only locally, and that opinions were tied to their identity. Take my mom for example. She's 80 years old and doesn't use the internet that much. She is confidently wrong about a lot of things she sees on TV or hears on the radio. A recent example is COVID misinformation. The difference is that my mom can't easily influence…

Given you are such an expert on viral disease, doesn't it make more sense for you to author a book, movie, ... to explain to your mum what she's wrong?

PS: I hope you're not one of these Wikipedia editors censoring physicists on Wikipedia because you "know" better?, or perhaps censoring virologists on Wikipedia because likewise.

PS 2: Some doctors were wrong about COVID. Some governments were very wrong. COVID lockdowns hurt the world economy worse the GFC.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#152

Post by gnramires »

gnramires wrote: post #149
doliveira wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my admittedly limited understanding, the failure of the semantic web is one of mankind's biggest missed opportunities. Now the knowledge graph is just locked behind Google's neural network layers and only being used for ads.

Maybe something like a 'WikiInfo' (or another better name :) ), that contains a hierarchy of (potentially all) known pages and topics? I think the only way to tackle this problem is collaboratively and distributedly. You could add for example a 'Newspapers' topic, and then say 'The Springfield Times' and then have 'Articles by date', 'Articles by topic', etc. like a huge database (browsed hierarchically like "WHERE d…

I've looked online and there's WikiData[1], which I didn't know and looks very nice. Although it seems to be more of a plain database, not concerned with Indexing. It also doesn't seem to contain objects such as all newspaper articles (without the text body of course), I wonder if that would be accepted data. Maybe we could build upon WikiData as a backend and present a hierarchical index.

As a humble suggestion, I'd divide all information in: (1) News (all news articles), (2) Publications (books, blogs, magazines, etc.) (3) Ideas and things (countries, planets, people, theories). Any object can belong to multiple categories/classes. I think it's not important that categories be perfectly devised, only that they contain all objects, and objects can be found reasonably well within them. The main point of objects would of course be a link to an actual web page that contains what you're looking for.

Please, someone do it! (I have way too many projects right now)

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#153

Post by QuasarOne »

trinsic2 wrote: post #93
mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #6

IMO the worst side effect of current web of knowledge is what I'd call the illusion of knowledge. When it was more difficult to access and publish information, that imposed a much higher bar on what was being consumed. These days, people watch a 10-minute YouTube video or read a reddit comment or twitter thread and believe (perhaps unconsciously) that makes them knowledgeable in said topic. They will then, in an abso…

Id say it's gone the other way too. Expert opinion echo chambers are rampant on the internet preventing paradigm shifts in science.

Isn't "expert opinion" a fallacy?

If the expert is right it's hardly an "opinion"; it's more a fact. But we still talk in terms of "expert opinion" because there are other experts with, sometimes, diametrically opposite views. Do we get to hear all these experts? Not a chance.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#154

Post by MichaelCollins »

grumbel wrote: post #50
ricardobeat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…

> No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much better places for publishing and archiving content than the rest of the Web. With Youtube you don't have to worry about URLs changing or domain names expiring or anything like that. You just publish your video once, get a unique video-id and don't have to worry abo…

> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well.

Tons of them aren't. I've run into many linked from wikipedia footnotes that no longer exist, particularly digitized film from the 20th century. A ton of wikipedia pages still cite old films, documentary footage, linking to videos which were uploaded by Jeff Quitney, who was banned from youtube a few years ago because some of the old films he uploaded contained material that ran counter to modern values (I think the one that eventually got him banned was an old christian film warning children about homosexual predators.) When they banned him, they took down a ton of completely innocuous videos because a tiny minority were offensive.

https://archive.org/download/Jeff_Quitney_me

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#155

Post by MichaelCollins »

dredmorbius wrote: post #147
londons_explore wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlisted youtube videos from 10 years ago are all gone... Google made the decision to delete every video 'shared by URL' because of the possibility that the URL generation algorithm had leaked. It was legally less risky to delete all the content than to risk leaking all the content to the open web. IMO, they made the wrong call - it would have been better for the internet as a whole to notify all users that "We have…

Do you have a source for this?

I think he has it slightly wrong; unlisted videos were made private (not deleted AFAIK, but still rendered unavailable.)

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27610409

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#156

Post by johannes1234321 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #146
grumbel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much better places for publishing and archiving content than the rest of the Web. With Youtube you don't have to worry about URLs changing or domain names expiring or anything like that. You just publish your video once, get a unique video-id and don't have to worry abo…

> There is no ISBN when you write a blog, no library were you could look up that ISBN. An ISBN is a string of characters, much like a URI/URL, and offers no more "protection" for long term access and the latter. Books get mangled and lost too; their only benefit is that it is harder to mangle and lose them, and there is likely to be more than one of them.

More or less all "proper" books are kept by national libraries. So if you got real need, there is a chance to hunt them down.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#157

Post by concinds »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #6

IMO the worst side effect of current web of knowledge is what I'd call the illusion of knowledge. When it was more difficult to access and publish information, that imposed a much higher bar on what was being consumed. These days, people watch a 10-minute YouTube video or read a reddit comment or twitter thread and believe (perhaps unconsciously) that makes them knowledgeable in said topic. They will then, in an abso…

I used to agree, but I'm not sure I do anymore.

Yes, social media gives anyone a microphone; non-experts can speak on advanced topics with zero knowledge. But Gell-Mann Amnesia predates social media. The "reputable sources" of yesteryear were anything but.

Experts ignored the media and got their info from other experts. That hasn't changed. The masses were clueless or wrong about most things, that hasn't changed. People were gullible and believed anything they read, that hasn't changed.

To me, the real negative change from the Information Era isn't a decline in knowledge, it's the shift towards centralized socialization online.

People were robbed of their ability to form independent social groups and subcultures, or to differ significantly from the mainstream. There will never be anything like the hippies, punks, or emos ever again. Music used to be the major "gateway" towards political and social countercultures. Now? Music is ultra-commercialized. Online movements are much more easily molded by commercial interests and TPTB. "Counterculture political views" get promoted on Fortune 500 brands' Twitter accounts. Remember the BLM protests in 2020? Police killings increase slightly in 2021 compared to 2020, and are on track to remain stable this year; about the only lasting "legacy" of those protests was that a few grifters bought multi-million dollar houses with donation money. There is no counterculture that doesn't get coopted.

Counterintuitively, something else reinforces the status quo: social media algorithms' bias towards empty controversy. Could Gandhi's peace message succeed today? Martin Luther King? Would they even be audible?

Project yourself 10-20 years into the future, with ubiquitous availability of GPT-3-style AI; will any of what you read online even be from real people? The "open web" movement is missing the wider problem. All the effects I describe are fundamental and unavoidable consequences of the web connecting the world together; regardless of whether it's "open", or kept in corporate walled gardens.

Centralization leads to winner-take-all effects. When every road leads to Rome, it marginally increases prosperity in the periphery, while it overwhelmingly drives traffic and economic activity away from the periphery, towards Rome.[0] The same happens when you "connect all humans" together. Remember the story from a few days ago, about 90%+ of online content being created by 1-2% of people? Any counterculture needs to be insulated from mainstream influences in order to truly thrive; but social media dynamics (karma, "viralness") inherently directs content towards the lowest common denominator, i.e. the status quo. The web itself, for all the good it does, is the problem. What's the solution? Don't know.

[0]: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1184807240198426625 (for a screenshot of the quoted tweet: https://twitter.com/AidanHeronUK/status/1184856198648139777)

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#158

Post by pessimizer »

pasc1878 wrote: post #19
ricardobeat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…

Depends where you read. Also how do you read the news of 50 or 100 years ago - isn't that more difficult. I use UK news sites. BBC Guardian and Telegraph all have their old articles online

BBC used to be an extensive and complicated site with non-news articles, study guides and curated collections. All of that was destroyed with a revamp. You can still read the news articles, but that's all that's left.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#160

Post by trinsic2 »

QuasarOne wrote: post #153
trinsic2 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Id say it's gone the other way too. Expert opinion echo chambers are rampant on the internet preventing paradigm shifts in science.

Isn't "expert opinion" a fallacy? If the expert is right it's hardly an "opinion"; it's more a fact. But we still talk in terms of "expert opinion" because there are other experts with, sometimes, diametrically opposite views. Do we get to hear all these experts? Not a chance.

The problem is our egos get in the way of real facts. Experts are humans and they are just as vulnerable to being wrong as the rest of us. Its great that there are people who dedicate there lives to a discipline, but sometimes experts use there positions of being right to distort larger truths, especially in areas where we don't have all the facts, but think we do, and when careers are on the line, experts can ban together to protect themselves. Id rather find my own way to the truth, then to rely on an expert that may or may not have an interest in protecting themselves from career breaking situations.

Expert positions can create a false sense of security that we know all there is to know about a subject, and that is just as damaging to society as not knowing the truth.

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