34 mentions · 20 chunks · 19 episodes
Why is the emergent process of creating Wikipedia convergent? Because there's only one article on each topic. There's a zero-sum thing to fight over. If you want a given perspective represented on th...
...d. For example, if one person is known to be prominent enough to have their own Wikipedia page.
...nsistent notion of what "good" means, will default-converge. This is one reason Wikipedia works. The norms are coherent and obvious enough that all of the random jostling movements in it all accumulate into something much bigger than the s...
...e's individual incentives happen to align. This is one of the things that makes Wikipedia tick, for example.
...re's no pressure to societal level convergence. All divergence, no convergence. Wikipedia is convergent because it's scarce. There's one Barack Obama article, and if you want some fact to be in it, you have to fight to make the case to eve...
...and represent their interests on an ongoing basis. That authentic belief is why Wikipedia works. When Wikipedia forks then only the zealots go to the fork, and that bias makes it more and more extreme in that direction. That's one of the r...
Wikipedia works because to land and stick a fact you care about you have to keep investing authentic energy. Whoever cares more wins, and people align their ca...
If Wikipedia waited to figure out the ontology before starting they never would have started. You have to muddle through in a way that is concave. That over time,...
...tivated people can indirectly create value for a ton of people?[hk] That's what Wikipedia does.[hl][hm] Wikipedia shows the best of the internet. People with limited structure can anonymously create convergent value emergently. It's not th...
This week I learned about the Scots Wikipedia controversy. Scots is a language with a small number of speakers. A few years ago someone on Reddit noticed that the Scots Wikipedia had a high numbe...
Wikipedia is an auto-assembling process driven by collective interest. The things people care about is what is read, and is what is written.
...e about public digital infrastructure: "If the contemporary internet is a city, Wikipedia is the lone public park; all the rest of our public places are shopping malls—open to the general public, but subject to the rules and logic of comme...
What is the magic that makes Wikipedia so antifragile? It holds no monopoly on being an internet encyclopedia.[wn][wo][wp] Within itself it has a single namespace: there's only one article...
...ares most about, which makes it rivalrous. There is one Barack Obama article on Wikipedia because Wikipedia has one main namespace[xq]. This is what forces the random percolating energy about that topic to be convergent vs divergent. Every...
... process, so that more activity helps select the better stuff automatically. In Wikipedia, this is the fact that there's a single shared namespace. There is only one article named "Barack Obama," and the community has to come to a competit...
...ject that can be distributed in the app laws of physics. Why does the output of Wikipedia cohere? Everyone who chooses to participate, and who earns trust and authority in that community, adheres to north star principles that lead to a coh...
...le: https://www.aishwaryadoingthings.com/from-physics-envy-to-biology-envy From Wikipedia's article: Positive deviance (PD) is an approach to behavioral and social change. It is based on the idea that, within a community, some individuals ...
Why do people contribute to Wikipedia? Because everyone knows that everyone knows that Wikipedia is the canonical source of factual information on the web. This is an effect that has grav...
A few riffs on LLMs. An intuition for things that LLMs will get right: if Wikipedia has explained the concepts well. Those facts are likely to also ripple out and inform lots of other sources across the internet, making it way more l...
Last week I learned about the Baptists and Bootleggers frame. From Wikipedia: "Bootleggers and Baptists is a concept put forth by regulatory economist Bruce Yandle, derived from the observation that regulations are supported b...