Without even knowing that or expressing any kind of curiosity about it, just look at the assumptions you are making about me. Social media is just conditioning us to keep reacting to one another and it doesn't have to be this way.

I haven't made too many comments on HN cause this is the kind of reaction I get all the time. If you are interested here's my fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14125904

If you want to understand what the implications are you need to spend time not with technologists but with ecologists. In nature there is a reason the apex predator doesn't evolve predatory advantages at a faster rate than its prey evolves defensive advantages. These rates grow or shrink in lockstep depending on resource availability. If they don't the ecosystem collapses.

I don't think NLP is necessary though.

If you take a look at the stackoverflow data dump sooner or later every possible variation of a question for a particular answer is going to get asked. Ofcourse there are always new topics that haven't been covered but this is a minuscule portion of the entire data set. I think it's a safe bet looking at Q&A happening on sites like Quora\Reddit etc in a couple years the chances that someone is going come up with a question that no one has asked before is going to be very low.

Wikipedia is missing 2 important pieces.

1. Linkage between all these questions and the content on the site. Currently Google provides this link.

2. A system to communicate to the reader what skill level /pre-reqs they need to fully appreciate/understand the content they are looking at. The UI for such a system already exists in most games.

Once these pieces are in place you are ready to create a very useful Anki deck on anything.

What most people don't realize is the entire mass of human knowledge given the size of most wiki/q&a site dump is about 100-150 GB. Throw in all the edu video content being produced on Khan Academy, NPTEL etc and you get to a 1-2TB. This isn't a big amount of data. All it needs is a learning system built on top of it for it all to be put to good use.

Google, Facebook devs please go spend some time with the language and platform greybeards at Microsoft.

EDIT: Feels like Software Engineering needs a set of Software History textbooks to keep reminding us of what has already been built.

This is a core feature of any educational system that has arisen across any culture anywhere in the world. Instant gratification does the opposite. This link might help in understanding the point I am trying to make - https://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/conversatio...

The root cause is the like/retweet/upvote/view count and the instant gratification it produces.

The social networks like FB/Twitter/Youtube benefit greatly from all their users being addicted to these counts. They know this. Its like a drug they peddle that produces a false high.

So whats the fix?

Rather than giving their users instant feedback and gratification if they just delay it for a bit or change the signaling(ie replace the numbers with color gradients,number less charts etc), most of unintended consequences we see of social networks (like fake news, celeb-worship, attention harvesting, mob rule, re-enforcing echo chambers of hate/rascism etc) will not disappear but get more controllable.

Expecting Google and Facebook to do this by themselves is like expecting Wall Street to self regulate and the NSA to come out with a road map to ending secret data collection. Its not going to happen.

They have to be strong armed, forced and publicly shamed into it. And that is going to happen sooner or later whether they like it or not. Because the consequences are pilling up.

It's the core piece of the architecture producing the instant gratification high that everyone is addicted too.

It really is the biggest factor that forces centralization of our social networks. Any decentralization scheme that produces value needs to address it. Most that get proposed don't.

Trump is working hard on changing that misconception.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14120473

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History tells us as these budgets grow uncontrollably sooner or later the empire runs out of cash to pay the soldier.

Stone tools have been found that are 2-3 million years old - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool