Thread by @sfiscience

"Argument-Making in the Wild"

Today's SFI Seminar by Simon DeDeo (@LaboratoryMinds), streaming now. Follow our thread for pull quotes and slides:

First, let's divide human history into three eras, or regimes of #knowledge #production and #consumption:

• #premodern/#archaic
• #modern + #postmodern
• the #egregore (online content sharing)

• The premodern era is defined by caloric restriction.
• The modern era is characterized by a small number of sellers of #information vs. a large number of consumers (see also #HerbertSimon's remarks on the "poverty of #attention")

In the third regime, there's a #feedback loop between #attention allocation and content production/consumption. We're living through a #phasetransition akin to the #originoflife, with respect to cultural #information:

Something has got to give: attentional #scaling is not indefinite. #ContentModeration

cc @GreatDismal

"It's sewage that is being processed and re-processed."
- Simon DeDeo re: @Twitter 🤣

(see also: "Your Catfish Friend" by Richard Brautigan:
poets.org/poem/your-catf…)

"We've never been in a situation where millions of people can respond to each other in minutes."

#media @Reddit

"This system is eating people, but it's not necessarily the same people every day."

And then with a shout to @MelMitchell1 and #ML #MachineLearning, the structure of the #perception/#reproduction cycle:

Re: work with @_c_perry and the #RedPill movement, a runaway #misogynist #ConspiracyTheory, and regarding it in terms of #metabolic closure – an #egregore on @Reddit fed by #attention and dissected with #TopicModeling (yay #Bayesian)

"In general, something like 90% of the people [in #RedPill] post once and disappear forever. Most people are tourists. Our question here is about #semantics. How do people flow through this space?"

Re: #Attention #Metabolism

"We're interested in how people make arguments online...for @hugoreasoning @dansperber, #arguments are fundamentally public and shareable #objects."

"It's a taxonomic question. There's a standard answer from philosophers: #inductive, #deductive, #abductive"

DOES anyone change their view on r/#ChangeMyView?

"Yes. About 1% of the time."

Re: #adoption, #abortion, #argument (on @reddit)

There are six patterns of #argument extracted from the #TopicModeling data on r/#ChangeMyView

"The most powerful argument you can make is a pattern of #causation. The second is from personal experience."

This structure checks out on @lesswrong:

@lesswrong "The point at which I start getting #deductive with you probably suggests a #breakdown in #assumptions."

"We're just looking at how people #convince each other. They MAY be #convincing each other of the #truth."

The after-party: Simon DeDeo holds court at SFI afternoon tea with our 2022 Undergraduate Complexity Research cohort, discussing the relative timescales of biological and cultural evolution in humans and how we are flying off the adaptive treadmill...
#ErrorCatastrophe
📈🥳☕