The New Enlightenment with Ashley

Why are there no middle-class musician jobs anymore? The explanation is based on one given by Jaron Lanier in his book, Who Owns the Future? How has technology contributed to rising inequality? It touches on the hope that Web 3.0 might bring for overcoming inequality.

This video explains how rank choice voting works.

This video explains the concept of prevalence bias and relates it to several behavioral economics concepts, such as arationality and salience. It discusses what social media does to cause prevalence bias, how this leads to insecurity, and what to do to counteract this in yourself.

This video gives a definition of web 3.0, identifies the features of big tech monopolies that web 3.0 will displace, and discusses barriers to it coming on the scene.

This vide explains how the advertising business model causes problems on social media.

Could social media algorithms improve relationships and make us more loving? This video explores the qualities needed in love, including quality attention, and the things that would need to happen for algorithms to optimize for the good.

This video the factors influencing the revolving door between the corporate world and the regulators who are supposed to hold those corporations accountable. How do corporations influence regulators through social engineering? I base this video in part on a section from Ben Goldacre’s book, Bad Pharma.

This video reviews the book "Breaking the Social Media Prism" by Christopher A. Bail. I summarize his view of the problem, two causes and the solutions. I then offer one critique and a few add-on points.

This video explores the idea of a corporate monoculture. What is it? I’m a pluralist. But I make a steel man argument in favor of the corporate monoculture. Then I list a few problems with it, both in the business sector and in higher education.

This video explores the question: When is information harmful? I consider how salience and placement within one’s worldview may play a more important role than truth or falsity or harmfulness or wholesomeness of information.

What might it look like to have Amazon on a blockchain? What might a new system look like that disrupted Amazon’s power? I explore that in this video.

This is a book review of the Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch. It looks at some of the ways we need to think about a structured response to the epistemic crisis.

Do corporations commit evil acts intentionally? In this video, I argue that evil corporate behavior often results from a few well-placed sociopaths & system characteristics that empower them.

This is a follow-up to my book summary of The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch. In this video, I discuss three parts of the story that I think are conspicuously left out, and one general critique.

Social media uses the golden pairing of threat and comfort to addict us and stoke anxiety. This video explains using an example, and outlines lessons for healthier use of social media.

This video explores the possibility that algorithms of the future will make decisions about upward mobility (access to jobs, schools, loans, health care, etc) based on our online browsing history. This may lead algorithms to favor those with preferences common among the rich, or uncommon among those in poverty. If this includes political preferences, this could be a destabilizing force.

This video goes through five facts from Anna Lembke’s book, Dopamine Nation, that are helpful in thinking about the ways that social media algorithms tap into our unique dopamine fingerprint.

What might institutions of the future look like? This video describes a 7 Online Universe World as a way of laying out one possible vision.

In this video, I argue that the new and creative institutions of the future cannot be purely online and text-based. They will need to include longstanding face-to-face communication within a community.

This video describes three possible visions of democracy (or the decline thereof) for the next 10 – 20 years: rebooted democracy, soft authoritarianism, and democracy in name only. I start by defining democracy and then describe each of the 3 futures in turn.

In this video, I describe the mechanisms blockchain community can use to establish identity on a blockchain. Most of the information from this video comes from the article “Who Watches the Watchment? A Review of Subjective Approaches for Sybil-Resistance in Proof of Personhood Protocols”. Here is the citation… Siddarth, D., Ivliev, S., Siri, S., & Berman, P. (2020). Who watches the watchmen? a review of subjective approaches for sybil-resistance in proof of personhood protocols. Frontiers in Blockchain, 46. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbloc.2020.590171/full

This video explains why entrenchment increases in systems over time, when entrenchment is good, how it relates to sludge, and when entrenchment needs to be turned over through creative destruction or revolution.

This video explains how the culture wars are a multipolar trap of contempt. Multipolar traps are multi-player Prisoner’s Dilemmas, which I explain using a game theory payoff matrix.

This video lays out a framework for thinking about evolutionary algorithms by comparing the social media algorithms with biological evolution. I make the argument that the algorithms select for clusters of content, fed slowly over time, that change the “environment” of our brains, nervous system and endocrine systems.

Revolt of the Public, a book by Martin Gurri, points out that social media promotes destroying, but not building. This leads to an instability because there are constant tensions between the Public and the Establishment. But if The Public ever gets their way, the regime that steps up to take the old elite’s place doesn’t have anything better to offer. The result is constant unrest. It is driven by the new transparency that social media brings in terms of what is happening behind the doors in elite spaces. If you plan to buy the book on Amazon, use this link to support the channel: https://amzn.to/45eJTDW