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> That somehow because a zillion people find something interesting, that I should, too, makes clear that the best we've done in filtering is assume people are sheep and need to be "fed" as such. No, it's just basic human pshychology. People imitate other people. People like what other people like. This is wired into us on a very basic level. Yes, these basic patterns are often stupid, from a purely rational persperctive. And yes, those of us who are trying to act more rationally (the HN, LessWrong crowd and others) see this behaviour as stupid. But it's irrational and naive to assume that it's easy or even possible to completely get rid of this basic behavioural patterns: they're wired in your brain on a very basic level, and you can only steer them and restrict them, but not remove it completely. And one more thing: these patterns are quite often good rough heuristics to solve a lot of problems that we don't want to waste a lot of resources on. For example, if you don't want to be a fashion icon (reasonable assumption for most audience on this site), you can always just buy clothes from the most popular brand out there, and with very high probability, you'll get clothes that fit, are of reasonable quality and have neutral social signalling. Of course, if you invested a lot of time into your own research on the matter, you'd be able to find clothes that perfectly reflect your personality, more thoughtfully use cultural context, are of superior quality and may cost even less - but would you bother? Most of HN readers usually answer "no" to that, because they have other priorities in life. Well, a lot of people just decide that their information diet on YouTube doesn't deserve such attention, and they're ready to watch whatever funny videos are just popular to fill their lunchbreak. |