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Stefan_Schubert comments on Does the Internet lead to good ideas spreading quicker? - Less Wrong Discussion
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"Spreading quicker" may not be the best question to ask. The question I'm more interested in is, What is the relationship between speed of communication, and the curve that describes innovation over time?
A good model for this is the degree of genetic isolation in a genetic algorithm. Compare two settings for a GA. One allows mating between any two organisms in the population. Another has many subpopulations, and allows genetic exchange between subpopulations less frequently.
Plot the fitness of the most-fit organism in each population by generation. The first GA, which has fast genetic communication, will initially outstrip the second, but it will plateau at a lower level of fitness, and all the organisms in the population will be identical, and evolution will stop. This is called premature convergence.
The second GA, with restricted genetic communication, will catch up and pass the fitness of the first GA, usually continuing on to a much higher optimum, because it maintains homogenous subpopulations (which allows adaptation) but a diverse global population (which prevents premature convergence).
Think about the development of pop music. As communication technology improved, pop stars like Elvis could be heard, seen, and their records marketed and moved across the entire country more efficiently than marketing local musicians, and replaced live performers with recorded music. On one hand, you could live in Peoria and listen to the most-popular musicians in the country. On the other, by 1990, American pop music had nearly stopped evolving. Rebecca Black could become popular across the nation in a single week, but the amount of innovation or quality she produced was negligible.
Basically, rapid communication gives people too much choice. They choose things comfortably similar to what they know. Isolation is needed to allow new things to gain an audience before they're stomped out by the dominant things.
You need to state your preferences as a function of the long-term trajectory of the entropy of ideas, rather than as any instantaneous quantity.
Great comment. Thanks!
This is an interesting idea, reminiscent of, e.g. Lakatos's view of the philosophy of science. He argued that we shouldn't let new theories be discarded too quickly, just because they seem to have some things going against them. Only if their main tenets prove to be unfeasible should we discard them.
I think premature convergence does occur regarding the spread of ideas (memes), too (though it obviously varies). I do think, for instance, that what you describe in music has to a certain extent happened in analytic philosophy. In the early 20th century, several "scientific" approaches to philosophy developed, in, e.g. Cambridge, Vienna and Upsala. Today, the higher pace of communication leads to more convergence.