Serendipity35

40 years ago, when physically absent social interactions first began to invade our lives with unseen, unheard people sending us messages, services like CompuServe’s CB  supported the clamoring digital hoi polloi.  The fascination of exchanging unspoken ideas with strangers, imposters and (sometimes) fools was so compelling, participants would spend hours interacting, oblivious to the ever-running connect-time charges meter.

Groups of online users would form, chat rooms were created where these users could share their thoughts and ideas with users that wanted to contribute to, debunk or annihilate the discussions.  Flame-wars would break out over impossibly trivial matters ('Clara Peller was NOT Wendy’s mother in the “Where’s the Beef?” ad!’ What’s wrong with you??). I posted “Don’t drink and type!” to those belligerents which, of course, only enraged them further. By the time CompuServe CB died, these groups had all backed into their own corners and waited for the next-round conflict bell to ring. There was no external source, no online referee that defined the groups or their behaviors. Cooperation and opposition were organic functions.

I own up to my cyber-dyslexia. Every time I see or hear the phrase “social media,” my brain immediately translates it to “anti-social” media, but I’m not sure the “Anti-“ part is a result of the way the media is crafted or whether it is part of our individual identity.

Are social media algorithms truly to blame for online polarization, or do our own choices play a bigger role?

Social media algorithms collect and analyze vast amounts of user data, such as browsing history, interests, and interactions. This information is used to tailor content feeds to individual preferences, ensuring that users see posts most relevant to them. Algorithms heavily weigh engagement signals like likes, shares, comments, and watch time. Content that receives higher engagement is more likely to be promoted and shown to a wider audience. Once user data and engagement signals are collected, algorithms rank content based on predicted relevance and interest. Posts that score higher are surfaced at the top of users’ feeds, while less relevant content is shown less frequently or not at all. Ranking is continuous.  Updates happen as soon as new data arrives.

Like the Wendy’s commercial back in the mid-1980s, algorithms can amplify divisive content, but that isn’t their design.  They function by interaction.  They are more like the force that kept the connect-time clock running in the CompuServe CB.  They are engines of profit.  These back-end processes do not create the groups.  People follow the subjects and experiences that reinforce their own perspectives and join with the like-minded.

Understanding the human element in all of this cyber-selected content is key to understanding and abandoning algorithmic polarization. Not all engagement signals are beneficial; negative interactions, such as outrage or controversy, can also boost content visibility. Algorithms do not distinguish between positive and negative engagement, focusing instead on overall activity levels.  What starts as a personal action on social media can escalate into widespread influence, affecting conversations and shaping public opinion. Recognizing this path will highlight the importance of mindful engagement online.

We are all curious, it is part of who we are.  When we click around on the internet looking for some tidbit of information —“Was Clara Peller really a vegetarian?”  [No - Following her, popularity, she was presented with a 25-pound hamburger by the cattle industry and was gifted an apron that read "Beef Gives Strength”.]  And while a search like that may spawn hamburgers ads all over your chosen media, be aware that the engine that sends the content back to us is not trying to raise your cholesterol or shorten your lifespan or drive you to some nutrition-oriented political party.  It is only there to make money by offering you what you have already looked for.

If you are careful selecting how content is accessed, you can change the choices presented by the algorithms. If you use a browser like DuckDuckGo to access content instead of proprietary apps, your tracks are more difficult to follow.  And if you want to see a sudden and startling change in the content that is offered to you, open a browser and type Happiness in the Search bar, you may be surprised at what begins to follow you around.

That result is not in their algorithm, but in ourselves. 

I inherited a copy of Douglas Hofstadter's book, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, when I started working at NJIT in 2000. It was my lunch reading. I read it in almost daily spurts. I often had to reread because it is not light reading.

It was published in 1979 and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. It is said to have inspired many a student to pursue computer science, though it's not really a CS book. It was further described on its cover as a "metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll." In the book itself, he says, "I realized that to me, Godel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to reconstruct the central object and came up with this book."

I had not finished the book when I left NJIT, and it went on a shelf at home. This past summer I was trying to thin out my too-many books and I came upon it again with its bookmark glowering at me from just past the halfway point of the book. So, I went back to reading it. Still, tough going, though very interesting.

I remembered writing a post here about the book (it turned out to be from 2007) when I came upon a new book by Hofstadter titled I Am a Strange Loop. That "strange loop" was something he originally proposed in the 1979 book.

The earlier book is a meditation on human thought and creativity. It mixes the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. In the late 1970s, when he was writing, interest in computers was high, and artificial intelligence (AI) was still more of an idea than a reality. Reading Godel, Escher, Bach exposed me to some abstruse math (like undecidability, recursion, and those strange loops) but (here's where Lewis Carroll's "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" gets referenced though some of you will say it's really a Socratic dialogue as in Xeno's fable, Achilles and the Tortoise) each chapter has a dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles and other characters to dramatize concepts. Allusions to Bach's music and Escher's art (that loves paradox) are used, as well as other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem serves as his example of describing the unique properties of minds.

From what I read about the author, he was disappointed with how Godel, Escher, Bach (GEB) was received. It certainly got good reviews - and a Pulitzer Prize - but he felt that readers and reviewers missed what he saw as the central theme. I have an older edition, but in a newer edition, he added that the theme was "a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?" I Am a Strange Loop focuses on that theme. In both books, he addresses "self-referential systems." (see link at bottom)

The image at the top of this essay is The Treachery of Images by René Magritte. It says that "This is not a pipe." That is a strange loop.

One thing that stuck with me from my first attempt at GEB is his using "meta" and defining it as meaning "about." Some people might say that it means "containing." Back in the early part of this century, I thought about that when I first began using Moodle as a learning management system. When you set up a new course in Moodle (and in other LMSs since then), it asks if this is a "metacourse." In Moodle, that means that it is a course that "automatically enrolls participants from other 'child' courses." Metacourses (AKA "master courses") feature all or part of the same content but customized to the enrollments of other sections. 

This was a feature used in big courses like English or Chemistry 101. In my courses, I thought more about having things like meta-discussions or discussions about discussions. My metacourse might be a course about the course. Quite self-referential.

I suppose it can get loopy when you start saying that if we have a course x, the metacourse X could be a course to talk about course x but would not include course x within itself. Though I suppose that it could.

Have I lost you?

Certainly, metatags are quite common on web pages, photos, and for cataloging, categorizing and characterizing content objects. Each post on Serendipity35 is tagged with one or more categories and a string of keyword tags that help readers find similar content and help search engines make the post searchable.

A brief Q&A with Hofstadter published in Wired  in March 2007 about the newer book says that he considers the central question for him to be "What am I?."

His examples of "strange loops" include M.C. Escher's piece, "Drawing Hands," which shows two hands drawing each other, and the sentence, "I am lying."

Hofstadter gets spiritual in his further thinking, and he finds at the core of each person a soul. He feels the "soul is an abstract pattern." Because he felt the soul is strong in mammals (weaker in insects), it brought him to vegetarianism.

He was considered to be an AI researcher, but he now thought of himself as a cognitive scientist.

Reconsidering GED, he decides that another mistake in that book's approach may have been not seeing that the human mind and smarter machines are fundamentally different. He has less of an interest in computers and claims that he always thought that his writing would "resonate with people who love literature, art, and music" more than the tech people.

If it has taken me much longer to finish Godel, Escher, Bach than it should, that makes sense if we follow the strange loop of Hofstadter's Law. ("It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.)

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End Note: 
A self-referential situation is one in which the forecasts made by the human agents involved serve to create the world they are trying to forecast. http://epress.anu.edu.au/cs/mobile_devices/ch04s03.html. Social systems are self-referential systems based on meaningful communication. http://www.n4bz.org/gst/gst12.htm.

If you are technically so inclined, here is a bit of overview training on the data devouring
and digestive processes of the 21st century Αδηφαγια, Artificial Intelligence

On January 28, 1754, the word “serendipity” was first coined. This blog showed up 252 years later, serendipitously.

It’s defined by Merriam-Webster as “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” However, it was listed by a U.K. translation company as one of the 10 most difficult English words to translate. 

The invention of many "agreeable" things has been attributed to “serendipity,” including Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Charles Goodyear’s vulcanization of rubber, inkjet printers, Silly Putty, the Slinky, chocolate chip cookies, and this blog.

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin after he left for vacation without disinfecting some of his petri dishes filled with bacterial cultures; when he got back to his lab, he found that the penicillium mold had killed the bacteria.

Viagra had been developed to treat hypertension and angina pectoris. It didn’t do such a good job at these things, researchers found during the first phase of clinical trials, but it was good for something else.

The principles of radioactivity, X-rays, and infrared radiation were all found when researchers were looking for something else.

Julius Comroe said, “Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer’s daughter.”

Wiktionary lists serendipity’s antonyms as “Murphy’s law” and “perfect storm.”

“Serendipity” was first used by parliament member and writer Horace Walpole. He reported that he came up with the word after reading a fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip.” As the Princes travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not seeking. The three princes of Serendip hail from modern-day Sri Lanka. “Serendip” is the Persian word for that island nation off the southern tip of India.