Comment by bbor

This is a fantastically written post by someone whose blog title tells me we'd be friends, but it's also perhaps the most absurd example of idealogical bias I've ever seen. In this case, the bias is towards individualism and contemporary American conservatism/liberalism. Like;

  The histogram for the sparse network shows a wider spread of "world knowledge" values. This range and the standard deviation indicate a more varied distribution of information among nodes. While in the dense network, the uniformity of colour suggests that almost all nodes have closer "world knowledge" values. Information spreads quickly and uniformly, leading to a more homogeneous knowledge distribution among all nodes.

Truth is good, my friends. They later describe this as leading to "echo chambers" and use some examples of fake news from the past to illustrate this, but I think this is entirely backwards. Echo chambers form in spare networks because that's, uh, that's what a chamber is. I won't go quote-by-quote because as I said above the analysis itself is good, but again and again they apply a biased worldview to end up focusing on the wrong results of that analysis. Probably the funniest quote is:

  In an era of unprecedented connectivity and access to information, we expected a renaissance of cultural innovation. Instead, we find ourselves in stasis, where the sheer volume of content has led to a paradoxical cultural gridlock.

Just because you don't like modern culture doesn't mean it's not "innovative". Even if we restrict the analysis to English speakers in "the west"-ish, public opinion on gender identity, sexual orientation, public healthcare, international relations, parental labor division, neurodivergence, and open world games have changed considerably. Just to name a few important topics off the top of my head ;) And if we're talking aesthetic cultural innovation, I really don't see a problem with the current internet other than "hollywood sucks" and "vine no longer exists"