The problem of missing people on the Internet
July 26, 2024 Reading time: 9 minutes
If you are a frequent Internet user, you may notice an interesting phenomenon: a mismatch between your expectations of how many people should be engaged in various issues, and the actual reality. This situation is especially common on social media. For example, I recently joined a Facebook group with about 5 million members, but when I looked at the group's activity, I saw only about 10 people asking questions and making comments.
The same was true for Reddit. Conduct a test: go to Reddit and examine discussions in communities with over 200,000 members, where more than 50 members are online. You will hardly see any comments, and the ones you do see are often generic, like "Aha!" Recently, I tested this by posting a message in the group "MeaningOfLife," which has about 4k members. I was thrilled to receive one comment, but the group seemed completely inactive otherwise.
Next, visit Reddit's main page. You'll likely notice that 100% of the most popular posts are mundane, and honestly, quite silly, such as, "My girlfriend got a terrible haircut and she's crying," which garner thousands of comments and upvotes. While I suspect many of these comments and upvotes are from bots, it still raises questions. Why does this happen? Who is steering our civilization into such a state of being? Programmable bots? But who programmed them?
Disclaimers
February 22, 2024 Reading time: ~1 minute
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How to write a book using Google Docs
February 21, 2024 Reading time: 2 minutes
Recently, I've posted some instructions about how to write a book using Google Docs. I just wanted to share my experience with this approach of creating large books. Now I'm writing a new book and I had to learn quite a lot about how to do this in Google Docs.
Statistics and simulation show that wealth is just pure luck
February 21, 2022 Reading time: ~1 minute
A recent article "Talent vs. Luck: The Role of Randomness in Success and Failure" published in Advances in Complex Systems Vol. 21, No. 03n04, 1850014 (2018) (arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068) shows that, according the a new computer model of wealth creation, the most successful people are not the most talented, just the luckiest. The developed computer model accurately reproduces the wealth distribution in the real world. One of the most important conclusions of this simulation is that the wealthiest individuals are not the most talented (although they must have a certain level of talent). They are the luckiest.