I was more interested in the obesity analogy and where that might lead, but I think you only ended up doing a less productive recapitulation of Bostrom’s vulnerable world hypothesis.
I think “knowledge explosion” might be a more descriptive name for that, I’m not sure it’s better strategically (do you really want your theory to be knee-jerk opposed by people who think that you want to generally halt the production or propagation of knowledge?)
Knowledge Obesity though… I’d be interested in talking about that. It’s a very good analogy. Look at twitter, it’s so easy to digest, extremely presentist, hot takes, conspiracy theories, sounds a lot like the highly processed salted fat and sugar of information consumption, to me. The places where the analogy breaks are interesting. I suspect that it’s going to be very hard to develop standards and consensus about healthy information diets because because modernity relies on specialization, we all have to read very different things. Some people probably should drink from the firehose of digestible news. Most of us shouldn’t, but figuring out who should and shouldn’t and how they should all fit together is like, the biggest design problem in the world and I’ve never seen anyone aspire to it. The people who should be doing it, recruiters or knowledge institutions, are all reprehensibly shirking their duty in one way or another.
I was more interested in the obesity analogy and where that might lead, but I think you only ended up doing a less productive recapitulation of Bostrom’s vulnerable world hypothesis.
I think “knowledge explosion” might be a more descriptive name for that, I’m not sure it’s better strategically (do you really want your theory to be knee-jerk opposed by people who think that you want to generally halt the production or propagation of knowledge?)
Knowledge Obesity though… I’d be interested in talking about that. It’s a very good analogy. Look at twitter, it’s so easy to digest, extremely presentist, hot takes, conspiracy theories, sounds a lot like the highly processed salted fat and sugar of information consumption, to me.
The places where the analogy breaks are interesting. I suspect that it’s going to be very hard to develop standards and consensus about healthy information diets because because modernity relies on specialization, we all have to read very different things. Some people probably should drink from the firehose of digestible news. Most of us shouldn’t, but figuring out who should and shouldn’t and how they should all fit together is like, the biggest design problem in the world and I’ve never seen anyone aspire to it. The people who should be doing it, recruiters or knowledge institutions, are all reprehensibly shirking their duty in one way or another.