Cognitive Thrift 25 – Network
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/06/15
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What might be the benefits in light of this speculation about information theory, communication theory, cybernetic theory, and more open information processors with more feedback? What are the benefits to highly networked thought?
Rick Rosner: We kind of know that there are cognitive economic benefits to highly networked thought within individual brains with the highly networked thought being consciousness.
In a practical sense, where you have all of these sub-processors in the brain that are sharing information on an ongoing broadband basis, which we can kind of guess that consciousness is beneficial. It’s not always beneficial in every single situation, where, you know, situations where you need to make a split second move are going to tend to be sub- or pre-conscious.
But where you need to process a bunch of information and make a decision or have an understanding, there’s benefit to having every part of your brain sharing information with every other part of your brain, and we can guess that networked information sharing amongst groups of brains or groups of information processors probably has benefits, and we’re in the middle of being much more networked.
Where you can imagine a bunch of people in the 1930s and the 1910s, and most communication is face to face, verbal, you’ve got newspapers and some people have telephones, but most information carrying interaction is one person to another person right there on the spot.
And I don’t know what the proportions are now, but the proportions have changed dramatically where we are gathering information from our devices every waking hour depending on how addicted you are to your devices.
And much of our communication is via texting or via talking on the phone, less and les on the phone and more and more texting, but there’s just much more or a greater flow of information, and across greater distances and I guess of a greater factuality, perhaps.
In that, much of the information that’s carried by our devices reflects some kind of news or factual content. But given all of that, it is hard to immediately hard to say that it makes us smarter.
In America, in the middle 2016 elections, we look really stupid. People look very committed to their information bubbles. Trump voters are generally stupid. Bernie voters are a different kind of stupid, but the appeal of both of those candidates are not.
They appeal for dumb reasons. Bernie wants to give people a lot of free stuff. He wants to level out the economic playing field with no easy way to do that. So, we’re in the middle of a stupid
time in America. So, it’s hard to see how all of our information has made us smarter. So, we kind of have to look where we might be smarter, and where we might be smarter is entertainment.
Where I’ve worked for 25 years, we are supposedly going through a Golden Age of television.
TV is much, much better than it used to be, and it is, and one way that it is better is that it includes more information and it is targeted for a sophisticated audience, not a more sophisticated segment of the population, but a viewing audience that in 2016 is more sophisticated and has seen more stuff than viewers in the 1960s or 70s.
So, entertainment moves faster. Plots are more intricate. More is left unsaid; people are encouraged to draw more of their own conclusions. There’s more realism than there was in earlier TV, and that’s largely because everybody has seen everything now.
Everybody has seen 10,000 different stories and heard 50,000 different jokes over their lifetime compared to a farmer in 1908 who has heard 19 jokes and knows the plot to 30 stories.
So, increasing sophistication is one benefit, I guess the pace with which redundancy and error might be knocked out might be another possible benefit, where everybody knows. Before the telegraph, it took days for people to find out days or weeks to find out news from different parts of the world. Now, people find out within seconds.
But, again, I’m not sure what the benefit is to the overall level or functioning of society for people knowing things instantaneously.
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