{"id":3025,"date":"2010-07-31T19:58:09","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T02:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/josemarquez.com\/xsml\/?p=3025"},"modified":"2010-07-31T19:58:09","modified_gmt":"2010-08-01T02:58:09","slug":"yes-your-mind-is-playing-tricks-on-you-its-how-it-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/2010\/07\/31\/yes-your-mind-is-playing-tricks-on-you-its-how-it-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Yes, your mind is playing tricks on you. It\u2019s how it works."},"content":{"rendered":"

People who are in the business of selling things have always tried to make the leap from observation, “People who like X also like Y”, to prediction, “People who like X will<\/em> also like Y.” <\/p>\n

Can supercomputers and massive amounts of data help businesses make that leap more consistently \u2013 with less risk of falling flat? For a few years now, Netflix has been trying<\/a> to answer that question. No doubt Google and Amazon are also engaged in the same experiment as are hundreds if not thousands of other groups.<\/p>\n

It’s noteworthy that the building block of these prediction engines is the human mind on a mass scale; or, more precisely, what logic we can infer from human behavior as expressed via simple human-computer interfaces \u2013\u00a0liking, recommending, a one-to-five star rating system, purchasing, gifting, etc. It’s a curious “gold rush” to tap the collective conscious.<\/p>\n

We spend a great deal of time thinking, talking and acting upon this collective conscious, a complex system of actions and reactions that define our society, from politics to marketing, from trend-setting acts like Lady Gaga to the recent controversy around vaccines and autism. <\/p>\n

Yet we seldom talk about the collective unconscious, a concept which to me is as essential as other simple machines<\/a> like the pulley or inclined plane. Invoking the collective unconscious, if only as a tool, allows us to take a interesting perspective on how thinking happens.<\/p>\n

To me, the tool works by laying out a few rules based on observable phenomena: that we are not exactly who we think we are; that an idea may contain another, very different idea; that we can never see the ground upon which we are standing \u2013 that for there to be a known there must also always be an unknowable unknown; that we communicate with one another in ways we are not aware of; that we think in ways we cannot be fully aware of lest that awareness impede the very process of our thinking.<\/p>\n

Let’s say our predictive engines get very good at catering to consumer wants; that 9.999 times out of 10, the engine I use to help me choose the next movie I watch results in a highly pleasurable movie viewing experience. Much of the data being used to make these predictions is coming from the aggregated choices of other people (in the future, it’s not just Soylent Green that is made out of people!) To the extent that these people are engaged in conscious choices, let’s assume they are also being guided by unconscious choices. <\/p>\n

In the same way that these social filtering mechanisms create feedback loops whereby a popular item can become a super-popular item, don’t they also become feedback loops for unconscious trends? <\/p>\n

Thus, instead of one person committing a “Freudian slip,” we can imagine an entire society committing a Freudian slip? In essence, an entire society playing a massive trick on itself. <\/p>\n

I’d love to see that. But, then, by the very rules of the unconscious, I can’t. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

People who are in the business of selling things have always tried to make the leap from observation, “People who like X also like Y”, to prediction, “People who like X will also like Y.” Can supercomputers and massive amounts of data help businesses make that leap more consistently \u2013 with less risk of falling…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.josemarquez.com\/etc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}