On Knowledge

What constitutes Knowledge?

When I was in school, teachers told me that “Life” is that which “is born, grows, replicates, and dies”. Simplistic, but I even remember the tone and “song” with which we were supposed to repeat it. And it stuck with me.

Densification of our social graph

Seeing Like a Network: An article in a blog named “Strange Loop Canon”, author is Rohit Krishnan, posted on Jun 19, 2024.

When modeled as one human → one node; one relationship → one edge; it’s quite evident that over the last century/decade, that the average degree of each node has increased significantly, causing the social graph to become more dense.

Some evidence: In 2007-2008, E. Horvitz and J. Leskovec find an average of 6.6 degrees of separation between 240M people after analyzing emails and instant messaging. In 2016, Facebook found that to be 3.57.

This creates a surplus of offer of information that one receives from their social network (not “those” social networks, your actual kin, peers, tribe).

There is a surge of anti-cultural, Thoreau-like efforts of escaping it.

“The push to create private spaces […] to truly express oneself […] is to help make the networks you’re in a bit sparser”

In software development, it is argued that sparse network structures facilitates the diffusion and generation of ideas among groups, while dense network structures affects the implementation of idea within each dense group.

The outcome of having a dense network is insidious but powerful. It means only the narratives which can go viral do go viral. The collective epistemic commons becomes filled with those narratives which outcompete the others and muscle their way to the top. It means that at a time of unprecedented low unemployment, high wages, high standard of living, GDP growth, high stock markets, strong dollar, people in the US still think they’re living in the worst of all possible times.

At some level of interconnectivity we all fall prey to the weaknesses of information deluge. Our attention is finite and so is our processing capacity for information. You can have the world do a denial of service attack on your cognition by overwhelming it with bits of information, so you’re stuck in place like a fly in amber. And it does this so easily that we haven’t even recognised when it happens let alone how to prevent it.

That too is why we have so many tools for thought, and ways to capture notes to search them afterwards, and tools for doing work about work, and endless lists and notes and contextual reminders and and and … It’s why we yearn for cultural islanding. It’s why there’s the neverending “current thing”. We’re all left tilting at the windmill of being a node in a dense network.