Bending Reality: Social networks have alternate incentives

Current world is juxtaposed in the desire to achieve a lofty goal and self-belief takes precedence over all else, facts and evidence need not be the sirens of the inner voice that forces one to act; alternate truth is where the sway of the mind is headed. There is a search for the higher yield, no matter how elusive that is, the belief for the unworldly outcome is paramount.

The most extreme examples of the world, where the collective wisdom has gone wrong is all around us. Those few who took a call that only one in a million could take were the surprise winners, they took these calls after a hundred failures, but their wins were so big that the failures were lost from all reflections. Collective wisdom can never end up making endless errors and therefore the chance of a rare success is that much remote, unless it happens by chance.

The search for the unworldly yield has driven us to the concept of bending reality; the finest innovations in technology came into being when innovators did not accept the current reality.

If the innovators accepted the conventional wisdom, no one would have created such path breaking innovations that we see today.

Alternate way to look at things is what prompted new ideas, the new lenses did not limit the viewing to mere facts that pointed to a certain hypothesis; questioning the current hypothesis is what triggered new innovation. 

In the world of business this is all over the place. If the new leader accepts the currency of beliefs and remains reasonable to the established norms, no change can ever happen. 

Think of the impossible things achieved in business from new products to new markets to new cost structures. A hand held device today has more computing power than the entire ensemble of devices that the world possessed a few decades back. There were a few people who believed in the impossible unreal, they believed in bending reality. 

Bending reality is first and foremost a stretch of our imagination, it is an attempt to move into the realm of things that may not exist. 

From Wright Brothers to Steve Jobs to Warren Buffet, the list is long who believed in alternate reality and then they bent it to establish the new reality. 

Making an equipment actually fly is bending the-then reality that creating lift and locomotion in air was impossible. Creating a 'touch' screen that replaces 'type' keys is a major innovation that believed a new dispensation. Beating the S&P 500 year after year in terms of returns was a new belief in an alternate reality. 

The interconnectedness of the world, with technologies that allow this to multiply every day, raises new dimensions to the story of bending reality. The recent additions are in the wrong direction like the Aldous Huxley novel, Point Counter-Point.

Making a false impression, diverting attention to an alternate unreal or influencing beliefs to be swayed by wrongful depiction or half baked facts was never so brilliantly executed as now, thanks to technology that makes allowance for support and instant affirmation. Followership of wrongful ideas was never so powerful as now, the numbers are all that matters. 

As algorithms take over, the rational and emotional distillation of the right from the wrong is passed on to the new sphere of the non-human. A perfect equation is only perfect if it has sense on both sides; if any number is multiplied by zero it will yield the same result but how would an algorithm distinguish between the right and wrong outcomes that stem from the wrong depiction. 

The laws of large numbers have so far told us one thing, as the sample size grows its mean moves closer to the average of the population. This is where we need to be careful that when cohorts are swayed by a powerful influencer, it could sway whole populations to a certain theme as the multiplicative effect is too much now thanks to social media. 

The algorithms search for numbers and higher traffic is what counts; what prompted the traffic is not important. All the incentives are crafted with the single minded focus of searching for eyeball 'views' and emotional response of 'likes'; purpose has lost relevance. It is like believing footfalls lead to sales, even if the product is a snake oil. 

The incentives in the social media are linked to numbers, the quality of the engagement is never a measure. Anything that leads to numbers is valued.

One would be almost reminded of Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point which is replete with the unworldly examples of characters manipulating to take decisions that are not to the best interest of everyone or getting swayed by facts that are closer to fiction or that the general habit is governed by passion which is nowhere near what a rational response would constitute.

"Oh, wearisome conditions of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound, Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity, Created sick, commanded to be sound.

What meaneth Nature by these diverse law; Passion and reason, self-division's cause?"

Today's social media is about these expressions, passion and reason both must hold.