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We Are As Gods

My first reference to the long-now idea – without referring to The Long Now by name – was this 2005 post about a technical / engineering exercise to create a sign the would physically and meaningfully survive 10,000 years. A sign sited to warn future humans not to accidentally disturb a long-life nuclear waste dump. Amazingly – contra link-rot – that exercise itself has survived 15 years on the web.

I remember much more recently being a little embarrassed at not recognising that Stewart Brand of 1968 Whole Earth Catalogue fame was one of the prime movers associated with The Long Now Foundation. At the time of the link above and most subsequent links in the blog it was Brian Eno’s name associated with it. Hat tip to @Longnow Foundation for this notification on my timeline:

We are as gods, so we might as well get good at it.

A Vienna Interlude

“Vienna Interlude” is a chapter title from Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, which I’m reading slowly between diversions domestic and professional. Still a little less than half-way through the whole, it’s a wonderful sketch of Cambridge, Bloomsbury (and Vienna) circles of the 1920’s. As with the words of Rebecca Goldstein, Margaret Wertheim and Alice Dreger before, I am absolutely smitten with Misak’s voice around the history and humanity of thought. Without analysing what that might be … understated, sympathetic and intellectually knowing (obviously) … it just rings good and true.

Tucked up on a cold, wet and windy afternoon with the log fire for company, I simply paused to capture this longish quote regarding The Vienna Circle being enamoured with Wittgenstein and their initial understanding of his Tractatus:

“They consigned to the dustbin of meaninglessness all unverifiable, non-observable propositions. Metaphysics, ethics, religion and aesthetics were all either to be revised so as to be stated in scientific language, or else to be abandoned as nonsense.”

Seems my existing caricature of their scientism is thoroughly confirmed. Later she continues:

“That there was some tension between Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle is [] understandable. They shared a project – what Ramsey called in his Critical Notice the ‘non-mystical deductions’ in the Tractatus or ‘new theories of propositions and their relations to facts’. That was a source of mutual attraction. But Wittgenstein thought that indicating or gesturing at all the things that are, as Ramsey put it, ‘intrinsically impossible to discuss’ was his most important contribution. The members of the Circle tended to sweep under the rug Wittgenstein’s bookend remarks [] about the importance of [the] ineffable []. Like Russell, they didn’t know what to make of them.

Wittgenstein was unimpressed with the Circle’s disregard of what he took to be the main contention of his book. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein would meet with members of the Circle, on and off from 1927, until 1936 when Schlick, with whom he was especially friendly, was killed by a mentally unstable ex-student.”

[My emphases]

That “Schlickicide” is the topic of David Edmunds book I have lined-up to read next. A little earlier in this same chapter, Misak muses on Ramsey’s harbouring the entirely mental exercise of “Wittgensteinicide”.

Loving the fact that the core philosophical points shine through the dark-historical period-piece. Cabaret (Goodbye to Berlin) or The Sound of (Viennese) Music with added fashionable Freudian psychoanalysis? A little earlier Misak – in the understated  laconic Gibbonesque style I suggested – is introducing Irishman Adrian Bishop, “known for his infectious humour, literary puns and louche lifestyle [] from an aristocratic background, openly and promiscuously homosexual.” with the footnote:

“He would go on to be a spy in the Middle East and either fell or was pushed to his death from one of Tehran’s most expensive hotels.”

Would that all philosophical texts were such a marvellous read. I said in my initial review, it is also superb “academic research” in its comprehensive yet non-intrusive referencing and, for my own project, I really should be making more technical notes, but it is just such a good read. One to savour.

Detailed notes will have to wait for a later read. Reading on.

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[PS – I notice Misak has an earlier (2016) book that fits my interests too: “Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein”.]

Roger Boscovich

Roger Boscovich (several different spellings) is an 18C Jesuit I regularly mention here as someone whose intuition of a fundamental view of physics probably influenced Mach and hence Einstein – though precious few if any direct references are discoverable.

Apart from a few Boscovich enthusiasts and a few web-pages dedicated to him (and Margaret Wertheim’s Pythagoras Trousers), I had forgotten this mainstream reference from Charles Simonyi in his response to the 2012 Edge Question. Must check where else Simonyi uses Boscovich references.

Boscovich smallest conceivable intervals of time and space are “atomic” in the true Democritan sense. For my work, these represent the smallest “fundamental particles” of information, the smallest difference between any two distinct things.

“An atom should rather be viewed as a point source of force, with the force emanating from it acting in some complicated fashion that depends on distance.”

Points than which nothing smaller can be conceived – by definition.

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Blimey, small world, Simonyi also contributed a 2005 Edge answer – about his intentional  / generative software concept. Moore’s law has left computing in an evolutionary backwater without it, he says. Sure has.

Obviously very wealthy from his original Microsoft involvement sponsoring the Oxford professorship bearing his name since 1995, a multi-billionaire after selling his IntentSoft back to Microsoft in 2017, 2 x space tourist(!), mega-yacht owner and sponsor of Princeton IAS. Up there with Gates, Bezos and Musk.

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Conscious Will – The View from Science

Coincidentally, having just read and reviewed the Dennett piece at lunchtime today, after having it bookmarked for a month or two, I picked-up on a Twitter thread between Philip Ball and Sabine Hossenfelder on pretty much the same topic, but based on a piece I also had bookmarked for sometime, by Ball in Physics World.

Despite a period of being seemingly open-minded to philosophy, Sabine seemed to have nevertheless ended-up at what I consider the caricature position of physicists. Since causal effects of conscious will cannot be explained by orthodox physics, it can’t be real. No escaping that causation itself is an elusive concept even if consciousness and free-will can themselves be explained. One thing’s for sure, something in the orthodoxy has to give, whether it’s in physics itself or in the nature of causal explanations. I’m with Dan in the evolutionary nature of causal explanations. Philip at first sight seems to suggest a dualist explanation – that there is something other than physics that explains consciousness:

“Philip Ball argues that “free will” is not ruled out by physics ” because it doesn’t stem from physics in the first place.”

But I see now that’s the editor’s click-bait, maybe not necessarily what Philip is really arguing.

(Continuing, after a full read …)

“[I]s free will really undermined by the determinism of physical law? I think such arguments are not even wrong; they are simply misconceived. They don’t recognize how cause and effect work, and by attempting to claim too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics they are not really scientific but metaphysical.”

Claiming too much jurisdiction for fundamental physics and acknowledging (metaphysical?) claims beyond physics.

“[W]e can have both (physical determinism and free-will). It’s simply a matter of recognizing distinct domains of knowledge.”

Still sounding very dualist? Unless one posits a single metaphysics underlying both domains – sometimes called a dual-aspect monism – a metaphysics that physicists can accept.

“The underlying problem here is that the reducibility of phenomena ” which is surely valid and well supported ” is taken to imply a reducibility of cause. But that doesn’t follow at all. What “caused” the existence of chimpanzees? If we truly believe causes are reducible, we must ultimately say: conditions in the Big Bang. But it’s not just that a “cause” worthy of the name would be hard to discern there; it is fundamentally absent.”

Now you’re talking – evolutionary causation is not “reducible” in the same way as an “atomic” ontology of phenomena that exist.

“There is good reason to believe that causation can flow from the top down in complex systems.”

Absolutely! – so evolved outcomes are a whole history of repeated two-way / circular interactions. (Will we be hearing of non-ergodicity later here?)

“[Avoiding the problematic language of “free” and “will”] Decisions are things that happen at the level of neural networks and they are made using the coarse-grained information available to sensory receptors and neurons. It makes no sense to regard them as interventions in particle interactions.”

“[T]he origins of volitional decision-making lie in evolutionary biology, [this] doesn’t share an epistemic language with Newtonian and quantum mechanics. To talk about causation in science at all demands that we seek causes commensurate with the phenomena: that’s simply good science and good epistemology.”

Anyway he concludes with:

“[Metaphysics] can be fun
and stimulating to debate such things,
but it is not science.”

OK, so he is saying these different epistemic domains are all within science, physics and evolutionary-neuro-biology are such distinct domains. No metaphysical duality as such. No metaphysical claims at all.

But. What makes such domains distinct – emergent-from / supervenient-on – each other has to be an important question? How we come to have an epistemic-ontology, with what exists being dependent on the language of what is known and meant in a given evolved domain.

I could understand science – the physical orthodoxy of science – being sceptical of that being sufficient explanation, but Sabine is wrong to simply give-up on causation at the boundaries of what physics can explain and declare such inexplicable phenomena as illusory.

A well argued piece from Philip. I feel Philip and Dan would find a great deal to agree on.

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All my own epistemic-ontology would add is a metaphysical choice. That given that what exists somehow depends on “epistemic language”, that something like “information” – the stuff communicated by language – must underlie all domains, physical science included. In my epistemic-ontology all things and phenomena would be reducible to “particles” (Democritan atoms) of this stuff. Even without going back to metaphysical levels, it’s pretty clear that information is in some way fundamental to both physics and evolution. No?

Interestingly, in the Twitter thread linked above Philip offers this 2013 PNAS paper co-authored by Giulio Tononi (of IIT fame) and edited by Michael Gazzaniga, both referenced here multiple times, most recently in the previous Dennett post. A small and ever more convergent world.

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Dennett & Conscious Will – Having the Right Conversation

Since Dan Dennett’s (Jan 2018) “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” (B2BnB) which I wrote about here, I’m not aware of other general publication work from Dan. When it comes to human consciousness and free-will Dan is a hero of mine I’ve written about in many contexts.

I’ve seen a few articles and talks since, and had mentally filed away that he was working on a paper with evolutionary systems engineering guru John Doyle, someone I picked-up on in the work of Michael Gazzaniga. I’ve seen no evidence of Dennett / Doyle collaboration since, so maybe wishful thinking on my part maybe.

One longish Dennett paper – from later in 2018 – I’ve had bookmarked for quite a while appeared in the proceedings of the Royal Society. I only got around to reading it this lunchtime.

As with B2BnB, this paper is really about changing the conversation on consciousness. “Our very rationality is at stake” I summarised previously. Sweeping away popular misunderstandings that are getting in the way of progress – progress that is otherwise very substantial, if only we can let go some scientific and philosophical illusions.

Primarily here, he is switching out Chalmers “hard problem” and replacing it with his own “hard question”. The “so what?”, “how come?”, “what next?”

Qualia don’t exist as things to be represented and perceived by our homunculus. They are our representation – in the complex dynamic patterns of our senses – of that which our sensors perceive.

Typically when experimenting on conscious subjects they are “systematically constrained” for the sake of science “to a tiny subset of the things they can do”. Since the point of our conscious will is open-ended creative possibility it is not surprising that this kind of scientific orthodoxy fails to find it.

One of the other features of a constraining kind of political correctness in scientific consideration of consciousness is the idea that conscious will in humans can be no different to that found in other sentient and/or “intelligent” creatures. He lists the obvious candidates – primates, corvids, cephalopods, cetaceans – but concludes (as I have) that the open ended creative nature of conscious will is of a different order or kind in humans. It’s a special evolved feature of our species, literally. That’s a kind of human exceptionalism, except there is nothing to say that equivalent consciousness can’t evolve anywhere else, just that in our corner of the universe we just happen to be that species. And that confers no special rights to the home planet, just a special responsibility towards it.

The only illusions are our misunderstandings. And, as Dennett said several different ways in B2BnB, if we constrain our conversation to the orthodox conventions of those we’re debating, we’ve already given up. What is needed is the same kind of creative dialogue that led to the evolution of ourselves.

The Hypocrisy of Debate

Reading on in Cheryl Misak’s biography of Frank Ramsey, we’re into his early undergrad life at Trinity Cambridge. Trying out the various college and university debating societies including the still legendary Cambridge Union.

A recurring topic of mine is the value of dialogue in contrast to the artificial win-lose aims of debating a motion. Inescapably and imperfect binary decision-making component of choice by voting in a democracy, but far from advancing truth and knowledge. Rather the contrary. An evolutionary degeneration  towards a world of binary opposites, as I’ve characterised it many times in the last two decades.

After giving up on debating societies Ramsey records
(my [paraphrasing] Misak, quoting Ramsey):

He loathed the perverted ambition of debating … [playing to the gallery]

He found [it better] in less formal settings … [like being invited to tea to debate with individuals]

Obvious risks in identifying with the greatest genius that ever lived, but I do … also in his impression of mixed gender settings moderating the “silliness” of debate. And how about (with my day-job information management hat on) a woman’s intuition (Dora Black) after wading through an archetypal (C.K.Ogden) tutor’s office buried under cluttered piles of books and papers …

… a method of filing which would commend itself to anyone who knows that, once a thing has gotten into a folder of a filing cabinet, it will never be found again …

Too true. The hypocrisy of formally imposed structure.

Reading on.

Ramsey, Wittgenstein, Gödel and the rest.

Cheryl Misak’s biography of “Frank Ramsey – A Sheer Excess of Powers” is proving to be an excellent read. It’s a 500 page tome and is a beautifully presented academic reference work in terms of front and end materials. The main narrative is broken only by occasional elaboration in text box asides, contributed by recognised experts in each subject.

For anyone interested in the limitations of logical positivism as I am, Ramsey’s key touch points with the other main players of early 20th century philosophy, logic, mathematics and economics – Cambridge and the Bloomsbury set – are already legendary. A legend of genius sealed by his untimely death in his prime, aged only 27 in January 1930.

Part of that interest is in the Vienna Circle and its relationships with the other players, so another book I have lined-up to read after Misak is David Edmonds “The Murder of Professor Schlick”. (Schlick being the “leader” of the Vienna Circle and the murder it seems being literal not rhetorical.)

But I’m only 70 pages into Misak’s Ramsey as I write this. After the Cambridge childhood and Winchester schooldays, Chapter 3 has set the stage for the the main players who “[really lived] in a great time for thinking” and with whom Ramsey was already interacting.  Keynes, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein.

At this remove, it’s hard to understate the importance of the world-in-crisis in the first three decades of the 20th century and the search for better models for understanding and living together in the world. Misak conveys the import. An import we surely face again as we enter the third decade of the 21st. Politics or economics, philosophies or logics, Ramsey had already discovered, before going up to Trinity Cambridge aged 17 in March 1920, as I have (now aged 65 next month in 2021), that metaphysical questions are unavoidable in these otherwise worldly topics. “PPE” depends on metaphysics to this day.

Russell’s mentor Whitehead had understood. Wittgenstein clearly had too. His WW1 (Austro-German) isolation evolved the written Tractatus to the point he was apoplectic at the empty tautology of “Russellian orthodoxy” misunderstanding his seeming “completion” of logic. Looking ahead in the index it is gratifying to see that the “speculation” of how different things might have been had Ramsey, Wittgenstein and Gödel had time to work together in educating the logical positivists in the errors of their orthodoxy. Another fascination of mine.

400 pages to go. I’m all in.

Dante. 2021 is Looking Up

Who knew 2021 was a year of celebration for Dante’s Comedia? Dante 2021 starts on BBC R4 tomorrow 1th Jan with an introduction from Katya Adler broadcast last week. Apparently there are many events planned in Florence and beyond in 2021, the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, having only just completed his magnum opus the previous year. I didn’t know any of that when I started a serious attempt to read it the weekend before Christmas 2020.

It’s a read that’s been on my list for most of the last two decades and probably 15 years since I acquired the Everyman Library translation by Allen Mandelbaum. I can even remember buying it, at Barnes & Noble on University Drive in Huntsville Alabama. The first of many false starts to actually reading it, prompted invariably by intriguing references in other works.

The next significant milestone was acquiring the Clive James translation in 2013. It looked more promising language but in fact proved another false dawn. But James’ notes did provide an important piece of information. As a read, it’s written backwards. With all the action in part 1 Inferno, and the dry philosophical theses in parts 2 and 3 Purgatorio and Paradiso. BBC Radio4 serialised the whole thing in 2014 and it’s being rebroadcast from tomorrow on BBC Radio4 Extra.

There was hope in early 2020 when I discovered Mark Vernon, active on my Twitter timeline, was a Dante scholar. But we know what happened to 2020! The tipping point to the latest attempt was reading the many references to Dante in Carlo Rovelli’s There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness a collection of his essays published in Italian media in recent years. As a big fan of Rovelli in my wider agenda concerning the metaphysical boundaries of physics and consciousness, that read was ultimately disappointing (a longer story) but I posted references to 6 or 7 really wonderful pieces in the first half.

I can confirm having completed Inferno and Purgatorio – skim-reading towards the end of the latter, and now thinking hard about embarking into Paradiso – that Mark, like Clive James, is right. Parts 2 (and 3) much tougher going than part 1. (After trying both versions – quite different in style – I did find the traditional translation easier, feeling closer to Dante himself.)

Though even in Purgatorio there is the recurring “virtual reality” of the physical geometry / topology of Dante’s world being somehow other than our orthodox 3D.

Anyway obviously I’m not writing “a review” of Dante, but I can say I’m really glad I shared Inferno and Purgatorio with him, even if I never venture into Paradiso. I am of course going to have to revisit the first two to pick out the metaphysical links – it’s not the kind of read you can really annotate as you read. The rhythm demands attention. Wonderful stuff, as many greater than I have commented previously.

Loved our visit to Florence and Pisa in 2018, focussing on Galilean connections. I can see future Dantean visits are on the cards, but maybe 2021 will enforce other priorities.

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(Aside. One linguistic observation, the occupants in translation are referred to as “shades” – is that ghosts of souls?)

We Can Be Heroes in 2021

It’s fair to say 2020 wasn’t the year most of us were expecting, and it’s not over yet. It’s been a very long 2020.

As well as the culmination of the self-inflicted BoJo/Brexit/Trump insanities that meant UK and US were distracted from what really needed attention in the world at large (Chinese Uyghurs anyone? Climate Change solved?) Covid took over any remaining attention-spans we had left.

The effect was compounded for me personally, because towards the end of 2019, after a decade of mostly home working – visiting colleagues and clients in person as and when necessary – I’d just committed myself to near-full-time working at offices ~120 miles from home. Back to a previous life on the road and mostly in hotels a couple of nights a week. The particular job was (is) complicated enough in scale and complexity of partners and stakeholders, that the switch to enforced total homeworking has been a hammer blow.

Mostly home working as-and-when is a flexibility. Enforced total home working is a millstone to progressing shared understandings of a novel approach to information architectures for digital transformation – to use the jargon of my current day-job. Remote working works well with people with whom you have significant shared understanding and trust, but not when you’re still trying to get on the same page under complex work pressures. That requires human dialogue and contact beyond the formal transactions.

Anyway, this isn’t about me and my day job, it’s about the relevance of information & communication architectures to the full context, humanity and our ecosystem. The information environment and decisions made by us and for us about Brexit, Trump, Covid etc. Decisions which are themselves reflected in everyday life and day-job choices. Follow-the-science & official advice vs fake-news & conspiracy-theories at its most stark.

Since the 1940’s – before electronic computers – that’s been known as Cybernetics. These days it’s called Systems Engineering – human systems to manage the organisation & governance of human affairs – biological, social, business, political – you name it. In my day-job it’s primarily about business systems and operations, but all human life is here in any complex business.

Just before I committed to that job in Sept 2019 I posted about identifying a new potential hero in terms of systems architectures, systems which go right back to biological evolution of our sentient and purposeful selves. Our human architecture. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Last night was the US day-after the Trump rabble(*) insurrection of 6th Jan 2021 and social media was full of “takes” and updates. That whole melee of information, official & individual, fact & opinion, real &”fake”. One thing’s clear, a large part of the Trump mob angle comes from the QAnon all-purpose anti-establishment conspiracy-theories end of that spectrum, whether it’s rigged-elections, anti-vaxxers, white-supremacy vs antifa or whatever.

(* I say “rabble” – but with the actual intent and planning, and a little different chances on the day, it was close to being a mob bloodbath.)

Deciding – or simply having an opinion about – the best thing to do with or about Trump and his mob is tricky to say the least at many levels across many timescales. Obviously for most of us there’s a general bias towards justice, but that still leaves many options. And none of the choices is independent, eventually they’re integrated into an objective reality and a collection of perceptions we have to live with. In my previous post I started to bring in journalists that get the significance of the information communication architecture – how the information flows affect the actual knowledge content, when the consumers are democratically (individually) controlling them, as we are in social-media environments. (It’s an idea as old as McLuhan, but …) Transparency that bypasses the idea of professional media is ultimately and inevitably degenerate. (Read the Jay Rosen 24-tweet thread linked in that post.) All issues degenerate to binary / unstable extremes, with all stable / nuanced options crowded out.

Last night – in a pause from the Trump traffic – I happened to watch the lecture by the potential hero I’d blogged about in Sept 2019. John C Doyle. Apart from capturing the link and my reasons for doing so, I’d completely forgotten I’d watched it before last night. Looking at my on-line activity, it seems entirely random that I did.

“System architectures for massively enhanced evolvability” is spookily close to my day-job agenda, but that’s a story for another day. The game changer for us humans more generally is this:

Human systems architectures are well evolved
to deal with bio-genetic viruses. (And deal with mountain-biking down steep rocky paths.)

Human systems architectures are not well evolved
to deal with info-memetic viruses.

The latter is our bigger problem right now.
Has been (my main agenda) for two decades.

It’s been apparent since the rise of personal email, compounded in the days of bulletin boards and email exploders, and gone nuclear thanks to real-time “unmoderated” social-media. The human system can’t handle it for in-built design reasons. The information  channels are too fast for our internal system dynamics and instability is inevitable.

Breivik#2 – The Nashville Bomber – Tip of an Iceberg.

Different collection of conspiracy theories, different anti-establishment target … but

Spent over a year building the bomb in the RV in his back yard – trespass warnings on gate and front door – reported by a girlfriend back in 2019.

Mailed his “manifesto” to conspiracy mates, used his dog’s name Julio as his on-line ID, and took the dog with him in the suicide bombing – Breivik planned for the legal martyrdom rather than suicide.

Warner targetted AT&T assets and went for minimal human targets, early morning Christmas day, whereas Breivik targetted people that represented the left-right conspiracy extremes. (Destruction of the old downtown buildings and businesses particularly on the east-side of 2nd Ave will be long term damage to a great city. The west side already had modern office buildings.)

Supremacists or Antifa – all the same, extremist nutters at both ends of the “fascist” spectrum – and Trump has a lot to answer for. The AT&T / 5G / chips-in-brains conspiracists were welcomed to a White House meeting in the past year.

This CBS report will do for now, but will add detail and more links when the content of his packages are made public. (And this Tennessean story with some details a day earlier. More from ABC News overnight 2nd/3rd Jan.)

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Notes:

(And yes, Tim McVeigh preceded Anders Breivik.)

(Not becoming a “big story” amidst all the other Covid and Trump stories – mainly it seems because he killed no-one other than himself and his dog – by design. Doesn’t change the scale of the conspiracy-ideology-motivated action? It only leads if it bleeds! But just as dangerous to humanity.)

(And – the antivaxxer angle – different case – the Wisconsin pharmacist sabotaging Covid vaccines. We need to address not just countering the content of conspiracy theories – which generates more for-against traffic on the content. We need to address moderation the “environment” that supports the traffic – that reinforces the ideological conspiracies to action in the first place. See Jay Rosen at foot of the threads below.)

(And – the Trump-led 6th Jan insurrection – need I say more. Q it is.)

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Why do I care?

Thing is, conspiracy theories are an easy “intentional” take on what is a natural memetic evolutionary problem with reasoning degenerating to simplistic polarised extremes in our times of maximum information communication – it’s why I’m here these two decades.

We need “moderation” – proper journalism – unfettered communications are dangerously degenerate.


Seemingly unconnected?
(Each link is part of a Twitter thread …)


The connection ? … is mass communications – in fact it’s the mass interconnectivity of the communications that allow “like ideas” to connect with and reinforce each other – and drive to polarised extremes crowding out subtle variation and nuance.

This whole thread – the rejection of “journalism” by internet processes – Jay Rosen and Alice Dreger – two journalists that “get it”.

“Information is downstream from identity”.

Remember that phrase!