I think you're underestimating how unusual your source culture was in the other direction - it wasn't just short-lived, it was also new. Prior to the mid 20th Century, there wasn't a single dominant hegemonic power with an unified intellectual culture centered around a newly consolidated centralized administrative state and media apparatus. Then, shortly after WWII, there was.

There was also a world before the construction of a homogenizing information source (i.e. prior to the internet, broadcast media, the printing press), and that world was also not damaged in the way Neuromancer describes - it wasn't producing the kind of books you read as a kid. But it contained the raw materials used to construct the world that could write those books.

One thing to keep in mind is sampling biases in social media, which are HUGE.

Even if we just had pure date ordered posts from people we followed, in a heterogeneous social network with long tailed popularity distributions the "median user" sees "the average person they follow" having more friends than them.

Also, posting behavior tends to also have a long tail, so sloppy prolific writers are more visible than slow careful writers. (Arguably Asimov himself was an example here: he was *insanely* prolific. Multiple books a year for a long time, plus stories, plus correspondence.)

Then, to make the social media sampling challenges worse, the algorithms surface content to mere users that is optimized for "engagement", and what could be more engaging than the opportunity to tell someone they are "wrong on the Internet"? Unless someone is using social media very *very* mindfully (like trying to diagonalize what the recommendation engine's think of them) they are going to what causes them to react.

I don't know what is really happening to the actual "average mind" right now, but I don't think many other people know either. If anyone has strong claims here, it makes me very curious about their methodology.

The newsfeed team at Facebook probably has the data to figure a lot of this out, but there is very little incentive for them to be very critical or tell the truth to the public. However, in my experience, the internal cultures of tech companies are often not that far below/behind the LW zeitgeist and I think engineering teams sometimes even go looking for things like "quality metrics" that they can try to boost (counting uses of the word "therefore" or the equivalent idea that uses semantic embedding spaces instead) as a salve for their consciences.

More deeply, like on historical timescales, I think that repeated low level exposure to lying liars improves people's bullshit detectors.

By modern standards, people who first started listening to radio were *insanely gulllible* in response to the sound of authoritative voices, both in the US and in Germany. Similarly for TV a few decades later. The very first ads on the Internet (primitive though they were) had incredibly high conversion rates... For a given "efficacy" of any kind of propaganda, more of the same tends to have less effect over time.

I fully expect this current media milieu to be considered charmingly simple, with gullible audiences and hamhanded influence campaigns, relative to the manipulative tactics that will be invented in future decades, because this stuff will stop working :-)

It's funny to me, now that I look back on 2005 and what I said back then.

I argued that you should throw your TV out the window, because the content delivered there was being "tailored for you" by limited groups with vested interests. I argued at the time, that I would much rather be my own group with vested interest, and that the Internet enabled me to filter input according to my own preferences.

When I think about what you said, today, I realise that I was 100% correct - and how wrong I was to be joyous of it. Through various social algorithms employed by (most notably) Facebook and Google, over the years I've probably isolated myself from things that would've been of tremendous intellectual value for me - not least of which is the simple input of things contrary to my current way of thinking.

So it seems that, in the end, I still have to get off my behind and go looking for things to challenge myself with - I can't count on any outside force to bring these things to me, even by accident. Because, it seems, there are no more accidents.

At this point I should point out that the only reason I'm even here is because I read "HPMoR". It was brought to my attention because I'm into "fanfiction", and there was no reason to even consider the deeper things that it essentially "smuggled" into my perception. To put it another way: the person recommending it to me didn't do so because they thought it'd enrich my mental life - they did so because they thought I'd enjoy this well-written story.

there used to be just a few newspapers serving all the bubbles

I think that this in particular is a positive factor for quality of discourse / general intelligence, at least for large segments of the population.

Monoculture TV was trending towards 20-minute sitcom episodes, but now that we have HBO/Netflix many people choose to watch 10-hour seasons with complex stories. Radio and TV had talk shows with 5-minute interviews, now millions choose to listen to 2-hour podcasts. National magazines for nerds had to appeal to all nerds in the nation, but now I can choose to read LessWrong.

Certainly some people choose simpler and stupider. But when there was no choice, the mass media had to appeal to the common denominator - maybe not the 1st percentile of simplicity and stupidity but at most the 20th, not the 50th. This means that most people get smarter things when they have freedom to choose more niche media.

It feels to me like the historical case for this thesis ought to be visible by mere observation to anyone who watched the quality of online discussion degrade from 2002 to 2017.

My impression is that politics is more prominent and more intense than it used to be, and that this is harming people's reasonableness, but that there's been no decline outside of that. I feel like I see fewer outright uninformed or stupid arguments than I used to; probably this has to do with faster access to information and to feedback on reasoning. EA and AI risk memes have been doing relatively well in the 2010s. Maybe that's just because they needed some time to germinate, but it's still worth noting.

In my anecdotal experience, the kids are OK. At least as OK as we were when I was a kid in the 80s reading SF from the 60s and 70s.

If you want me to take this hypothesis more seriously than that, show more evidence.

I think it is worth noting that results probably vary a lot based on who you hang out around on the internet. Eg. us LessWrongers hopefully have improved our culturally transmitted software by hanging out around the rationalistsphere, whereas people who browse pictures of Cardi B on Instagram probably haven't.

So as far as looking for a takeaway that you can apply to your personal life goes, I don't think most readers here need to be too worried. I would say that we should be watchful, but not paranoid. Personally, I spend a bit of time on poker forums discussing hands, and I've been extremely frustrated with the quality of conversation and discourse there. I should probably keep an eye on myself to see if anything has rubbed off on me.

As someone who grew up with Greg Egan on the shelf, I want to note that Greg Egan said basically the same thing about "Neuromancer" (that it cares more about being fashionable than having the characters think through their situation), and "Quarantine" and "Permutation City" were in part responses to cyberpunk, so perhaps all is not lost.

Backing that up with Greg Egan interview quotes.

From the Karen Burnham interview, on hating "Neuromancer", and on the influence of cyberpunk on "Quarantine":

I read Neuromancer in 1985, because I was voting for the Hugos that year and I thought I ought to read all the nominated novels. I really hated it; aside from the style and the characters, which definitely weren't to my taste, a lot of things about the technology in the book seemed very contrived and unlikely, especially the idea that anyone would plug in a brain-computer interface that they knew a third party could use to harm them.

Over the next few years I read some Rucker and Sterling novels, which I definitely enjoyed more than Gibson. So there was some reasonable stuff written under the cyberpunk banner, but none of it felt very groundbreaking to anyone who'd been reading Dick and Delany, and if it hadn't been wrapped in so much hype I probably would have enjoyed it more. In fact, the way cyberpunk as a movement influenced me most was a sense of irritation with its obsession with hipness. I don't think there's much doubt that “Axiomatic” and the opening sections of Quarantine have a kind of cyberpunk flavour to them, but my thinking at the time would have been less “Maybe I can join the cyberpunk club!” and more “Maybe I can steal back private eyes and brain-computer interfaces for people who think mirror shades are pretentious, and do something more interesting with them.”

From the Marisa O’Keeffe interview, something that corroborates what Eliezer Yudkowsky said about "Neuromancer" characters worrying how things look on a t-shirt:

A lot of cyberpunk said, in effect: “Computers are interesting because cool, cynical men (or occasionally women) in mirrorshades do dangerous things with them.” If that really is the most interesting thing you can imagine about a computer, you shouldn’t be writing SF.

From the Russell Blackford interview, on the influence of cyberpunk on "Permutation City":

I recall being very bored and dissatisfied with the way most cyberpunk writers were treating virtual reality and artificial intelligence in the ’80s; a lot of people were churning out very lame noir plots that utterly squandered the philosophical implications of the technology. I wrote a story called “Dust”, which was later expanded into Permutation City, that pushed very hard in the opposite direction, trying to take as seriously as possible all the implications of what it would mean to be software. In the case of Permutation City that included some metaphysical ideas that I certainly wouldn’t want to repeat in everything I wrote, but the basic notions about the way people will be able to manipulate themselves if they ever become software, which I developed a bit further in Diaspora, seem logically unavoidable to me.

Something depressing is certainly going on in mainstream culture, since for example "The New York Times" hasn't had a review of a Greg Egan book since "Diaspora" in 1998, except to suggest "that Egan doesn’t fully understand how oppression works — or that he is trying to make an inappropriate point".

But science fiction seems alright, if it reacted to "Neuromancer" exactly along the lines of Eliezer Yudkowsky's reaction to this post, producing some of the most beloved (by sci-fans) science fiction of the 90s. And I still see every new Alastair Reynolds book in the sci-fi sections of non-specialty bookstores.

This post raises some reasonable-sounding and important-if-true hypotheses. There seems to be a vast open space of possible predictions, relevant observations, and alternative explanations. A lot of it has good treatment, but not on LW, as far as I know.

I would recommend this post as an introduction to some ideas and a starting point, but not as a good argument or a basis for any firm conclusions. I hope to see more content about this on LW in the future.

I'm concerned about the way you're operationalizing this (as in, insufficiently). Could you make this into an concrete prediction about the world? What sort of question about this could we post on Metaculus that wouldn't resolve ambiguous?

(a minor point. Feral children might not "exist", in a way. My zoological friends say it is quite possible that someone takes out an unfit child, or even just a mouth too many, to the forest and leaves it there. It is possible that a predator finds it and doesn't eat at once - predators can play with food. And it is possible that the child is found again before it dies. (Perhaps even without the predator part.) But it's no more than that.)

And yet "when you encounter a different way of thinking, judge it open-mindedly and then steal only the good parts" is directly contradicted by some modern software that seems to be memetically hypercompetitive.

I love this take on the villanization of cultural appropriation.

Support for this theory:

For a long period of time, maybe 13 to 15, I was strongly socialized to gross internet culture of precisely the sort you describe. I was deeply unfunny, my attempts at humor mostly grotesque, my political opinions malformed and underdeveloped, my style of discourse deliberately rude and provocative. I laughed at the idea that an issue could be "Complicated." Those dirty scoundrels on the other side were wrong, my social circle was right. What could be complicated about that?

Then, around 16, I rediscovered my childhood love of reading. I started with Stephen King and moved on to Terry Pratchett (a childhood favorite.) I read HPMOR, and moved on to a number of older works, including Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, an advanced English class showed me Dickens and Shelley, and I lot of Heinlein (including Stranger in a Strange Land,) etc. I slowly found myself transmogrifying. My opinions became more complex, my style of argument became infinitely more forgiving. I've attained levels of seeing-the-other-fella's point of view that would make the old me mock the new me as a nazi or something.

Essentially, I seem to be something of a scientific experiment (n = 1, of course) for this hypothesis. Once I got off the internet, started watching less TV and Youtube, and started reading books, I became better in precisely the ways you describe in this post.

Food for thought.

I always thought of the internet in the same way that Night City is described in Neuromancer:
 

"Night City [is] like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button."

The internet is just societal evolution set on fast-forward.