The New Enlightenment with Ashley

This video looks at the strategic layers of the culture wars and how these might play out on university and college campuses. It looks at the importance of the epistemic commons, and how the culture wars might be disrupting that.

What is the societal cost of social media pointing everyone’s attention toward the election cycle and celebrity gossip? This video argues that this misallocation of attention is taking away attention from the most important things making society function: our loved ones, our jobs and the problems that we have the eyes to notice.

This video explains the Dictator's Paradox and the Democratic Paradox from Martin Gurri's book, Revolt of the Public.

This video applies the logic of Thinking in Systems (by Donella H. Meadows) to Information Systems, such as the academic information-sphere and the journalistic information-sphere. I ask the question: What would we mean by “stock of information” in such cases? What would we mean by “inflow of information” into that stock and “outflow”?

This video walks through 4 stages of the evolution of instinct. I essentially make the argument that humans can vicariously program our own instincts (and the instincts of people in our communities) through storytelling. I use the System I / System II framework from Daniel Kahneman to think about how this works. The worry is that social media is hijacking our nervous system by reprogramming our instinct.

This video compares classic pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing schemes with influential industries, such as Hollywood, academia, publishing, journalism, law, etc. There are often poor working conditions for people at the bottom in exchange for the hope of one day reaching a higher level of the pyramid.

I consider the possibility that both rebels and bureaucrats can have authoritarian personality types within a system.

Boomerang Products provide immediate solutions to problems, but make those same problems worse in the long-run, so that you have to go running back to the product. These create addiction. Boomerang products are lucrative and may crowd out other products in the economy, which degrades the quality of the economic environment.

I argue that Web 3.0 needs real in-person communities to test out its tools for governance.

What are the arguments in favor of developing new online reputation scores? Web 3.0 developers need to consider these. I have a different video on the risks of such reputation scores (see link below). This video makes the case why they could be a net positive for the world, if proper considerations are made to mitigate against risks.

How do online reputation scores compare with social credit systems? Could corporate-issued reputation scores cause problems? What about reputation scores built into Web 3.0? We need to consider the risks of such scores as we move into a future that is likely to have them.

This video explains the difference between “Data as Labor” and “Data as Capital” as models of rights and the economic set-up to handle artificial intelligence in a way that is dignified for workers. It follows the following article… Arrieta-Ibarra, I., Goff, L., Jiménez-Hernández, D., Lanier, J., & Weyl, E. G. (2018, May). Should we treat data as labor? Moving beyond" free". In aea Papers and Proceedings (Vol. 108, pp. 38-42). https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pandp.20181003

In this video I review six books that help people to think about the future, including the future of platforms, artificial intelligence, economic distribution, governance, data and more. These six books are books that are required (or recommended) for students taking my course on the Economics of Digital Industries. However, they are all fun books.

This video goes through the game theory and economics explaining why unequal systems are more likely to become entrenched. I use the Gini coefficient graph and the Battle of the Sexes game in game theory to explain.

This video goes through a thought experiment. Imagine an evil trillionaire facing a “system” where everyone inside in the system is purely altruistic. Can that evil trillionaire bend the system in his favor with his money? I think the answer is “yes”, and this video explores that idea.

This video reviews the book Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Hofstadter and Pratt.

This video explains why funding models for collective intelligence are a battleground over control over A.I. I’m doing a series on the models of collective intelligence corporations listed in this article from the Collective Intelligence Project: https://cip.org/research/ci-corporation

I go over the five books that most changed how I think about the world. All of these are in the category of epistemology, or how we know what is true. They consider both truth itself, and the quirks and biases of our instruments for discerning truth (the brain and nervous system).

This video lays out a framework to understand how distributed governance might work to support pluralism in online communities.

In this video I review Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book How Emotions Are Made, and explain some of the key concepts in the book, such as the body budget, the predictive brain, concepts and how these relate to emotions. If you plan to buy the book on Amazon, use this link to support the channel: https://amzn.to/3OHBtzi

This video explains how sortition governance works and outline the advantages and disadvantages of introducing such a system. Sortition governance involves choosing people randomly to govern.

I make the case that handling the truth well is more important than speaking the truth.

In this video, I compare propaganda and education using the definitions given by the Consilience Project from this article: https://consilienceproject.org/we-dont-make-propaganda-they-do/ I also visualize the way propaganda moves online, and I make the case that if we want to fight propaganda, we need to foster educational spaces that build up people’s ability to handle the truth.

When we see headlines that use the word "collapse", should we be worried? How should we think about "collapse"?

This video goes through an example from Ch. 1 of Evan McFarland’s book Blockchain Wars that helps to explain what Web 3.0 is trying to accomplish, and why there are challenges to disrupting the tech giants. It explains servers and clients, and thinks through why decentralization is hard.