Twitter has as many active users (330m) as a budgerigar brain has neurons (321m). You’re part of a bird-brain here. The logo is apt.
The world has same number of people now (7.7b) as a rhesus macaque brain has neurons (6.4b). Email=3.8b=Bonnet macaque.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_a
Conversation
Rough stats:
0: World pop: 7.7b
1: People with phones: 5b
2: People with emails: 3.8b
3: Facebook MAU: 2.5b/1.5b DAU
4: WhatsApp, Instagram: 1.5b users/1b DAU
5: Twitter: 320m MAU
List index = graph intelligence quotient band (GIQ). Twitter is only *large* band-5 GIQ hive mind
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I’m just eyeballing it, but it would be useful to build a measure of GIQ to capture the computational quality of a hive mind based on topology, grammar of connection. Each If the band is int(log(GIQ)) on base 2, Twitter is 2x smarter than the messengers and 4x smarter than FB.
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There are many higher-band hive minds. I’d estimate github at say band 7 or 8. But they are not as big as these big ones with a meaningful share of world population on board. I’d put the cut-off for true hive minds at 1% of world pop, or about 150m active users.
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Analogy between brains and social graphs is probably better than you think. The big diff is that our synapses have a smaller signaling vocabulary. Brains use 0/1 signaling to 1st order. Human graph intelligences during emotional-phatic-speech are also 0/1 (sad/happy contagion)
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As our signaling at h2h level increases in sophistication, it doesn’t travel as far. A propositional logic statement (0/1) with an attached sentiment (positive/negative) can travel much farther than your nuanced tweet with 3 layers of irony. So most GIQ is tiny-instruction-set.
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The message complexity median message in a medium that propagates beyond say a local Dunbar-scale neighborhood (~150), aka “goes viral” is probably a good indicator of the computational sophistication of the graph intelligence. On Twitter that’s obviously a meme or epigram.
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And yep, this kind of gross morphology analogy is useful too. Twitter has no neocortex, and is bird-brain scale. So memes are like birdsong (which bird brains are known to rehearse when they sleep, ie they dream birdsong for long-term memory settling) twitter.com/Terence_Hughes
This Tweet is unavailable.
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Interestingly enough, any subcultural @ conversations here that seem valuable to you are by definition irrelevant since they don't propagate. They are attachment glue.
What you value on Twitter is almost certainly functionally a benign mind-parasite that doesn’t help hive mind
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This is a follow-on to my thread yesterday.
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A megatrend hypothesis inspired by several microtrend that I think are related:
a) waldenponding
b) rise of heavy duty information management methods like @fortelabs BASB (build a second brain)
c) conversational media eating authorial media
d) "hivebrain" jokes/references
Show this thread
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Replying to
Analysis possibly at wrong level of abstraction, Twitter fails at global deliberative function due to human biases not it's size or low msg dissipation in graph steps... But it's near perfect as species' attentional module, discovering impact/salience of all topics really well
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Please, I implore you to read some of the stuff here:
rina.tssg.org
STRONGLY relating to your discussion, even if it mightn't seem so at first. Metaphorically spoken:
The 'Internet' can—as it currently works—never have 'native' Chandelier, Pyramidal & Rosehip neurons.
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