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Web 2.0 Expo NY: Clay Shirky (shirky.com) It's Not Information Overload. It's Filter Failure.
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.Ted Nelson's Computers for Cynics probably doesn't contain technical information that's new to any of you, but Ted has a knack for reframing things in ways that make the arbitrariness of certain historical decisions clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjkOn the subject of hypertext, The Web That Wasn't gives a nice history of the idea (for anybody who thinks it starts with TBL -- surprisingly many people!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72nfrhXroo8
Another reframing-oriented talk is Clay Shirky's "It's not information overload, it's filter failure", which ultimately leads to Shirky suggesting the kinds of user-oriented filtering features that Mastodon has implemented: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
At the intersection of neurology and information science, Peter Watts always has something interesting to say, and as a former marine biologist focusing on the nervous system of starfish, this is absolutely in his wheelhouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAicTW7MGo
This one ("moving away from defensive programming") justified strong typing in a pretty clear way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj3lzsr0_I
Dan Dennett is just as relevant as Doug Hofstadter when it comes to metacognition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJsD-3jtXz0
Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science starts slow, but if you don't have much of a historical background (like, if you're only vaguely aware of what happened in CS in the 70s), it's a laundry list of things you should look up and be aware of before you start your next project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I_jE0l7sYQ
Everybody should understand procedural generation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WumyfLEa6bU
Likewise, since AI is hyped up right now, we should all remind ourselves that IA is a thing too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=narjui3em1k
More hypertext history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i67rQdHuO-8
Even more hypertext / UX stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDrHkNgGQDs
A great explanation of Fourier transforms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY
Allison Parrish does mindblowing things with corpus statistics by treating term vector spaces as generalizations of 2d image formats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3D0JEA1Jdc
Finally, these aren't tech talks but instead UI demo reels. If you have any interest in UI or UX, you should watch them. They are wonderfully cheesy, mostly doable, and despite being more than 20 years old, nobody has bothered actually implementing the useful features shown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb4AzF6wEoc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAJPoc23-M
Tagging is useful for a lot more than just finding old stuff on a topic. It's massively valuable for filtering new stuff and community management.A lot of the problems with the devolution in HN could be resolved by implementing a few common tags like, 'startups', 'programming', 'political', 'current_events', 'design' and then having different thresholds for each tag to reach the front page.
IMHO, the number of votes to reach the front page for a political story should be much higher than one that is about programming. I think most would agree.
With tagging pg would be able to figure out if one tag is getting out of hand and squelch it temporarily or even permanently.
As the community has grown, we're suffering from filter failure ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI ). The less HN is about stuff that is interesting to hackers, the more it becomes welcoming for people who aren't hackers, the more non-hackers that join the more up votes that non-hacker focused stories get. It's a vicious cycle and tag squelching is one good way of moderating the community and keeping it focused.
yay for clay and the middle way. he reminds me of uncle ben: "with great power comes great responsibility."he has a similarly level response to the problem of information overload (instead, filter failure): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI