Social Media Is a Huge Vat of Brains
Building a Better Truth Machine
Social Media Is a Huge Vat of Brains
People are running on scripts. They don't even realize they're running on scripts. Media scripts humans, just as computer code scripts machines.
When kids come out of a movie theater, they immediately start quoting lines and re-enacting what they just saw on the screen. Sometimes you can get people to do something by telling them to do it, but often just showing it being done is better.
Humans are mimetic. We mimic each other to acquire language and align on objectives. You could call it “contagious mental states.” I think this is an understudied concept. We know there are contagious physical illnesses, like viruses. Now consider contagious mental illnesses.
We all stuck our brains into Twitter. Being on Twitter is like putting your brain into a vat with 300 million other peoples’ brains who are all sending their brain-states to you electromagnetically. It feels a little unhygienic if you think about it that way. We create social distance offline, but we pack closely together online. Bad memes and crazy ideas spread faster than ever, because all our brains are connected.
If you go to Google Trends and type in a recent headline, you'll see the topic often goes totally vertical. Everybody cares about the topic suddenly. Then interest in the topic drops off just as quickly. People go manic over something they didn't even know about two weeks ago. It's life and death to them; they're willing to fight, kill, and burn things down. Then, three weeks later, they don't care at all and will never care again.
The offline world doesn’t reward rudeness to random strangers. Twitter, unfortunately, does. From an incentives standpoint, I think that is the problem. Starting fights on Twitter attracts followers. Followers are valuable. Starting fights in the physical world attracts police attention. That is not valuable. Ethics restrains many people—but not everyone, and not always.
My overall intuition is we need a totally new incentive-based approach to social networking now that we see failure modes at scale. Building Google was hard until seeing several years of Yahoo.
Popularity can be measured by likes. Truth can't be.
Status is a zero-sum game. Wealth creation isn't.
Lots of popular ideas on social media are a result of consistent repetition rather than independent replication. In cryptocurrency, we use the concept of independent confirmations. You don't approve a transaction right away. You wait for six independent confirmations.
Our mechanisms for information dissemination have advanced past our mechanisms for information verification. Fortunately, the information is electronic, on a screen, in a database. Maybe soon some of the truth can catch up to the lies.
