Beautiful order
Hi, I'm Tim. I'm a complex systems scientist with broad interests, but a thread that connects them all is cultural evolution, the process by which a culture accumulates design that nobody designed. Beliefs, habits and practices vary, people learn them from one another, some are learned more often than others, and over time the distribution in a population shifts toward the variants that fit their environment, which is mostly other people and what they already believe. Nobody has to intend any of it. Online, a large share of what people learn from one another now passes through ranking functions, which are selectors somebody wrote down, with an objective. My questions are what those selectors, and the newsrooms beside them, are selecting for, and what they ought to select for. I measure the first in the quality of political discourse, in how news frames the victims of conflict, and in how a population's beliefs hold together. The second is a question for democratic theory.