Gin, Television, and Social Surplus \ stacker news ~culture

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus gist.github.com/jm3/6724931

2311 sats \ 3 comments \ @moel 5 Feb culture

I love just about everything from Shirky - super lateral thinking in all the domains I care about. Here Come Everybody had a big impact on me.

Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

I don't like the implication that people use cognitive surpluses poorly by default, but I have no basis to believe they'd use it well if it's so new and our prior outlet was gin of all things.

To Shirky's point, perhaps we need to make it easier to dissipate the surplus into creation rather than consumption or at least make it more rewarding.

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project -- every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in -- that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

We should do this for SN @kr. Not sure of the methodology they used but we could probably take a stab at it.

The way you explore complex ecosystems is you just try lots and lots and lots of things, and you hope that everybody who fails fails informatively so that you can at least find a skull on a pikestaff near where you're going. That's the phase we're in now.

This is a great way to frame your failures as a creator. You are at least contributing a pikestaff.

2159 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 6 Feb

That book made a big impression on me, too. Made me really think of where time goes, what it amounts to.

Your comments reminded me of the leak before failure thing from Venkat. You may dig it too.

865 sats \ 0 replies \ @kr 6 Feb

We should do this for SN @kr.

interesting metric, could be a really good indicator of content supply over time.

one related metric (which might be easier to calculate) is how many characters of text people are adding to SN each day.