High-engagement obsessives are another key to this. In a community where it's nobody's actual job to spread knowledge and values of the community, the highest-volume interactors – the most engaged – become standard-bearers of the community. Since they are often more obsessive and dedicated yet visible, this raises the stakes of the community to greater obsessiveness and dedication.<p>In online scenarios, the result is that many can say, well, I am dedicated to X, but I'm not as extremely dedicated as Y... where Y may be literally one of the most X-dedicated people in the entire world.<p>When you have this majority illusion, some high-engagement obsessives, and throw in some producers of writings (news, documents, popular literature and orientation literature such as FAQs), you have an engine for converting dedication into social goods such as a sense of belonging, friendship, and most of all, self-identification.<p>The ability to create and sustain these communities in many forms, for any topic, worldwide, is the miracle of the internet.
We need a social network designed from the ground up to be a public square for civic discussion between people who disagree. We need mechanisms to agree on facts, and tools to create arguments supported by those facts.
TL;DR: if highly connected nodes tend to have a given attribute, most nodes have the illusion that the majority has that attribute.<p>It's an interesting statement, but not terribly insightful. I hope more research follows.
arxiv postings should feature warning sign iconography. On one hand, it offers open access to research -- awesome. On the other hand, it offers us a chance to waste our time and energy studying material that may never survive peer review.<p>I get excited whenever I see what appears to be a really interesting, valuable piece of information gleamed through rigorous research. My immediate first emotion is excitement. However, that excitement casts a long shadow of doubt as my system 2 mode of reason kicks in and alerts me that the content of interest is the result of an arxiv posting that may fail to survive peer review. Of course, death-through-peer-review may not imply bunk science but I assume that it more often is the case (experts, please chime in).<p>This leads me to ask whether the HN community would be better without knowing of bleeding edge research on arxiv until it's graduated peer review --What do you think: Is it better to front page bleeding edge, unverified research?<p>I think the world would benefit by a service that indexes arxiv postings that have survived peer review. Is this feasible?