The really interesting question is, while you would generally expect old eminent figures to gradually decay (how often do you really need to cite Boethius these days?) and so I’m not surprised if you can find old eminent figures who are now in decline, are they being replaced by new major figures in an updated canon and eg. Ibram X. Kendi smoothly usurps Foucault, or just sorta… not being replaced at all and citations chaotically swirling in fashions?
I’ve speculated that the effect of hyper-speed media like social media is to destroy the multi-level filtering of society, and the different niches wind up separating and becoming self-contained hermetic ecosystems. (Have you ever used a powerful stand mixer to mix batter and set it too high? What happens? Well, if the contents aren’t liquid enough to flow completely at high speed, you tend to observe that your contents separate, and shear off into two or three different layers, rotating inside each other, with the inner layer spinning ultra-rapidly while the outer layer possibly becoming completely static and stuck to the sides of the mixing bowl. The inner layer is Tiktok, and the stuck outer layer is places like academia. The big fads and discoveries and trends in Tiktok spin around so rapidly and are forgotten so quickly that none of them ever ‘make it out’ to elsewhere.)
I expect any tests to show unambiguously that it’s “not being replaced at all and citations[/mentions] chaotically swirling”. If I understand Evans correctly, these were all random eminent figures he picked, not selected to be falling out of fashion—and they do seem to be a pretty broad sample of the “old prestigious standard names” space.
The stand mixer is a clever analogy; I didn’t previously have experience with the separation thing.
I presume you’ve seen Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?, and probably Hanson’s cultural evolution / cultural drift frame. I wonder if you’re familiar with Callard’s Distant Signals paradigm [ transcript available on episode page ], which I think is the most illuminating of the three.
It may be a broader effect of media technology & ecosystem changes: https://gwern.net/note/fashion#lorenz-spreen-et-al-2019
The really interesting question is, while you would generally expect old eminent figures to gradually decay (how often do you really need to cite Boethius these days?) and so I’m not surprised if you can find old eminent figures who are now in decline, are they being replaced by new major figures in an updated canon and eg. Ibram X. Kendi smoothly usurps Foucault, or just sorta… not being replaced at all and citations chaotically swirling in fashions?
I’ve speculated that the effect of hyper-speed media like social media is to destroy the multi-level filtering of society, and the different niches wind up separating and becoming self-contained hermetic ecosystems. (Have you ever used a powerful stand mixer to mix batter and set it too high? What happens? Well, if the contents aren’t liquid enough to flow completely at high speed, you tend to observe that your contents separate, and shear off into two or three different layers, rotating inside each other, with the inner layer spinning ultra-rapidly while the outer layer possibly becoming completely static and stuck to the sides of the mixing bowl. The inner layer is Tiktok, and the stuck outer layer is places like academia. The big fads and discoveries and trends in Tiktok spin around so rapidly and are forgotten so quickly that none of them ever ‘make it out’ to elsewhere.)
I expect any tests to show unambiguously that it’s “not being replaced at all and citations[/mentions] chaotically swirling”. If I understand Evans correctly, these were all random eminent figures he picked, not selected to be falling out of fashion—and they do seem to be a pretty broad sample of the “old prestigious standard names” space.
The stand mixer is a clever analogy; I didn’t previously have experience with the separation thing.
I presume you’ve seen Is Clickbait Destroying Our General Intelligence?, and probably Hanson’s cultural evolution / cultural drift frame. I wonder if you’re familiar with Callard’s Distant Signals paradigm [ transcript available on episode page ], which I think is the most illuminating of the three.
Besides just the cost of ~instantaneous ~omnicast communication dropping to ~zero, I see a role for the fall of the gold standard in all this. See e.g. U.S. per capita energy usage since ~1970, international fertility since ~1970. My theory [ which I really need to make a more legible graphic for ] is that when people don’t “own their money” and have to track the effects of distant inflation-adjusts from the Fed, inflation volatility [ the destructive macroeconomic thing this OP on /r/badeconomics is saying couldn’t possibly be happening due to the fall of the gold standard ] goes way up. Incentives in the market for ideas are ultimately material [yes, virtual status goods influence material wealth, but it also goes the other way around], so the market for materials influences the market for ideas, and vice versa, in a vicious spiral of decline. Is the theory.