Embeddigns
While reading The Acceleration of Addictiveness by Paul Graham I couldn't help but think of Jevons Paradox — a phenomenon that occurs when improvements in energy efficiency lead to an overall increase in energy consumption, rather than a decrease. The idea is that as technology becomes more efficient and cheaper to use, people and industries use it more, leading to higher overall energy demand. So, even though each device or process uses less energy (an observation described in Koomey's Law), the total energy use can still rise because of the increased number of devices or processes. The obvious point I'm trying to make is that we are all (at least most developed societies) addicted to energy. We probably got the first taste of it when we started using tools that allowed us to achieve more than we could with our own bodies. But as Paul Graham claims too, just because it's addictive it doesn't mean it's bad. As with all addictive things, the common perception is that it starts being problematic once it gets in the way of "normal function". In the energy addiction context I guess normal should mean sustainable. Like if the way we harness energy start becoming detrimental to our own survival (global warming is one obvious example) then maybe we need to reconsider the addiction. Many of us do, but unlike personal addictions — collective addictions require at least a majority of the addicted to be on board with coming "clean". This is all obvious and very well known so I will not go on further, but I guess I am generally more interested in these kinds of collective addictions rather than in personal addictions. While many "personal" addictions are often viewed as social phenomena too, I think some are more "involuntary", and require action on our part to "opt-out" rather than "opt-in".
I don't think I've really experienced addiction first-hand (I do realize that's what addicts say). I've seen many people that were close to me and addicted to all kinds of things — it was mostly the internet or some specific platform but from what I've seen it feels like people who are addicted to one thing have a tendency to become addicted to other things too. And maybe more often than not, letting go of one addiction just means replacing it with a different one. Most of the people I know are either on social media or not at all. Some spend so much time on it it makes them angry, then they go cold-turkey, deleting their profiles and removing the apps, only to go back on again at some point because that's inevitable for many of them.
I... just don't use it that much. I only log in once every few weeks. And the more I wait the more I don't want to go back in because it just feels like a daunting task at this point — I would have to answer everyone's messages, and say congrats and give likes and follow back and generally keep up with everything that I "missed". This aspect has gotten much better over time — after a while you just kind of realize nothing is that important and I'd rather spend my time doing other things, some of which are actually interacting with people face to face...
In the recent year (ever since the war started) going on social media has been extremely detrimental to my mental health — so much so that it started feeling like I'm engaging in self-harm whenever I do it, so I've been doing it even less.
But I guess I've found a good middle ground — I really do think my social media / internet habits are on the healthy side, most of which really just happened and wasn't a very conscious decision, but I'll try to outline some of my habits (feel free to skip this though):
On a different note, I had a conversation once with a friend about creating a social media app that is more... hierarchical. It would be this place where people can express their opinions about subjects, and ask questions and have debates. Every post would be indexed with contextual tags, and so you could read different opinions on any one subject and browse related ones too. The comments, or even the opinions themselves could be voted on, and most importantly fact-checked – so they would have a score of how "solid" they are. People could, and probably should, argue. But they would have to include credible sources if they want to be voted up, otherwise it won't catch on. Of course, there are many potential issues about implementing such a system, but the point was about having a social platform that exposes you to different views not based on how "viral" they are, but on how solid they are—I'm feeling weird about using the word "truth" here, but sure—how true they are, taking into account what we collectively agree on to be facts. You may say: whose to say what is a "fact" and what's not? Some would claim very well accepted scientific theories are wrong, and that should be a valid thing to do — you'd just have to include good enough sources for your claims. Of course, others will be encouraged to refute it.
For this, embeddings could be used to map the different subjects and create a space for wandering through them. I wanted to understand how that works for this week, and to my understanding the point you end up getting is always relative rather than absolute? So the mapping in space would have to be contextual. So it could work for any two posts at a time?
I tried working with embeddings a couple of weeks ago and got it to work but I think I only started understanding what it means now. It was taking any two string inputs (preferably one word each) and creating a new word that is a blend between them, and then positioning all three accordingly.
I was reading through Vicky Boykis' pdf about embeddings (through Dan Shiffman's github page about embeddings that was linked on this week's assignment page) to try and get a better sense of how they work. Unfortunately I didn't have enough time and mental bandwidth left to get into making something new this week but I look forward to exploring more interesting ways of using embeddings.
