Funding Friday: Bellwether

Well, current information technology permits lots of people at relatively low cost to create lots of content, new or not, good or not, popular or not, rational or not.The market and the court of public opinion together with some other forces will mostly determine the future of instances of such content.So, that future enables a much greater quantity and variety of content than we had in the days of, say, Walter Cronkite or, of course thousands of years ago campfire story tellers.Yes, to have better content, we will need different content, so being different is necessary. But being different is not sufficient, not nearly so.As it is, poor Greenspan seems to have left the building of rationality and gone out for a smoke of funny stuff. History has people who tried outside rationality, and mostly Darwin had his way — they are not our ancestors, we are not their descendants.E.g., we long had people who watched the stars on clear nights, saw some movements, and invented astrology and claimed lots of predictive power.Then along came Kepler and Newton and some astounding results of rationality.Astrology never was more than wild guessing; any reasonable tests of the predictive power would right away have shown that there was little or no predictive power; and the work of Newton and others clearly showed the magnificent advantage of rationalism — observation, careful data collection, some nice mathematics, some new physical principles, etc. — and should have left astrology on the scrap heap of history. Alas, some people still prefer to leave the building and smoke funny stuff.But the explosion of content no doubt will include some terrific new content. So, we will move from the few, big content sources of the days of Cronkite to tens of millions of sources. Then for each person on the Internet, billions of people, where like fingerprints no two are fully alike, an issue will be finding the content they like in the tens of millions of sources. So, tens of millions of sources and billions of receivers! Hmm ….

Comments (Archived):

Vendita Auto Aug 2, 2019

Not for me but it did remind me to order/send 4 Liu Cixin books to my my grandsons
jason wright Aug 2, 2019

Another soothsayer, and very big on ‘trust’.The future is what we will it to be, and not what we say it will be.
sigmaalgebra Aug 3, 2019

Well, current information technology permits lots of people at relatively low cost to create lots of content, new or not, good or not, popular or not, rational or not.The market and the court of public opinion together with some other forces will mostly determine the future of instances of such content.So, that future enables a much greater quantity and variety of content than we had in the days of, say, Walter Cronkite or, of course thousands of years ago campfire story tellers.Yes, to have better content, we will need different content, so being different is necessary. But being different is not sufficient, not nearly so.As it is, poor Greenspan seems to have left the building of rationality and gone out for a smoke of funny stuff. History has people who tried outside rationality, and mostly Darwin had his way — they are not our ancestors, we are not their descendants.E.g., we long had people who watched the stars on clear nights, saw some movements, and invented astrology and claimed lots of predictive power.Then along came Kepler and Newton and some astounding results of rationality.Astrology never was more than wild guessing; any reasonable tests of the predictive power would right away have shown that there was little or no predictive power; and the work of Newton and others clearly showed the magnificent advantage of rationalism — observation, careful data collection, some nice mathematics, some new physical principles, etc. — and should have left astrology on the scrap heap of history. Alas, some people still prefer to leave the building and smoke funny stuff.But the explosion of content no doubt will include some terrific new content. So, we will move from the few, big content sources of the days of Cronkite to tens of millions of sources. Then for each person on the Internet, billions of people, where like fingerprints no two are fully alike, an issue will be finding the content they like in the tens of millions of sources. So, tens of millions of sources and billions of receivers! Hmm ….