I don’t remember where I first heard ‘Digital breadcrumbs’, but I thought it nailed this blog’s raison d’être. Pages from a human being’s existence on this planet, to be read by himself later in time, and if humanity does get desperate, maybe even by a sociologist later. 😀 I came across the phrase recently again in this superb post on Farnam Street blog titled “Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture.”
To quote from it, (originally from the book Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture) “At its core, this big data revolution is about how humans create and preserve a historical record of their activities. Its consequences will transform how we look at ourselves. It will enable the creation of new scopes that make it possible for our society to more effectively probe its own nature.” Indeed, GMail, Facebook, Twitter all have ‘permanent’ records of our conversations and activities.
In The Black Swan, Taleb writes about the problem of silent evidence – a happy story of success or survival, that overlooks the stories of those who didn’t succeed or didn’t survive. History is probably full of it, because as he explains, it is seen with the effect of posteriority. (following in time) It creates a distortion bias – a systematic error consistently showing a more positive (or more negative) effect from the phenomenon. I had to wonder if one of the factors involved was the limited nature of records from earlier eras. So, the thought -will the deluge of ‘digital breadcrumbs’ in this era be able to provide a much better picture of ‘history’ in the future and factor in distortion bias much better?
I had a tangential thought as well, mostly thanks to a belief that at some stage in our evolution, we will be able to predict our future. I am not sure if Taleb has thoughts on AI and its effect on our predictive capabilities, but think about it – an objective, unbiased ‘intelligence’ that can help humans become anti-fragile. But then again, maybe the black swans humanity faces then will be of a completely different kind. I can’t help but use some Asimov science fiction to illustrate. In the Foundation series, Hari Seldon’s psychohistory combined history, sociology and statistics to make many accurate predictions about large populations. But The Mule, a mutant with psychic powers, was its Black Swan. A digital breadcrumb tells me that I’m not the only person who thinks so!
Interesting topic. In contrast are the prophecies of a digital Dark Age. Google´s Vint Cerf in this article describes his attempt to reduce the impact or avert such a state i.e. keep the digital breadcrumbs from going “stale”. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-31450389.
Lesser available information sets the stage for lesser distortion or in reality, more ??
Yes, read that. I’d think greater the info, lesser the distortion.
The thing is, I think it’s our ‘arrogance’ that causes us to believe that the way we store info now would be consumable for a later generation. I’m sure that’s what earlier chroniclers must have thought as well. As Taleb mentions, if we knew what their technology would be like, we’d already be building it. 🙂
P.S. Good to see you here 🙂