Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ in 2020 - proud of my ‘Drafts Inbox; having only 6 entries. - compare and contrast to 259 as of this morning.
Not your grandad’s Pluto
Today’s Surprise From History - 🖇️ Biggest surprise here is that it is still marked 🚧 - so I guess I need to finish it off!
🔗 Wikipedia Turns 25: What Editing Taught Me - is a great read.
The internet was supposed to celebrate differences. Instead, it’s weaponised conformity. We’ve narrowed acceptable discourse to a narrow band. A band where ±1 standard deviation seems to be too wide and anything outside the ‘consensus’ gets you piled on. (Consensus with a very loud and increasingly violent minority.) The phrase vive la différence is nearly extinct in modern English, and it shows. We are not ignorant of diversity - we’re terrified of it. So we hide the messy, interesting parts of ourselves and perform an acceptable vanilla version for the town square.
The result? A society suffocating under its own self-censorship. The crowd isn’t forcing us to conform - we’re doing it preemptively, trading authenticity for safety. We’ve accepted the bargain that you’re either with us or against us, and nobody wants to find out what happens if you dare explore the edges.
The road less taken isn’t less travelled anymore; it’s invisible.
This prompted on reading Om this morning: Our Algorithmic Grey-Beige World, but it isn’t a new theme of mine … or indeed others …
Another From Seth
But now, particularly with digital output, we’re doing it backwards.
Really great analogy - and IMHO - infinitely superior to the Pluribus analogy - at least my takeaway of same - although that is a different post.
That said - it would be so much easier if Seth not only came checked the story’s author - but maybe added a link?
So you don’t have to dive down the rabbit hole ..
🔗📚 The book (Tunneling To The Center Of The Earth) .. that contains the short story
🖇️ What’s strange is how little of that generosity we extend to each other
Quoting the quote:
I’ve been thinking about how quickly we’ve adapted to working with AI. We all understand the deal. If the output is bad, it’s probably on us. The prompt was vague. The context was missing. We didn’t give it enough constraints. So we revise. We clarify. We try again. No frustration. No judgment. Just iteration.
I know right? … and then the clincher
What’s strange is how little of that generosity we extend to each other. Somewhere along the way, we learned to treat machines as systems that need better inputs–but we still treat humans as if they should just know. And when they don’t, we judge competence, take it personally, make assumptions, or shut down.
Guilty. NO argument. Going to try harder.
The link above also references:
But better to read 🔗 UXtopian
👀 🔗 The Cost of American Exceptionalism
Absolutely eye opening and mind boggling.
You’ve probably already seen the video - or at least a still from it - but I just wanted to comment on the 🎵musical part - 🔗📼 just so good
📺 Said it before - say it again …
Billy Crudup.