The Midwit Signal Trap
The term “midwit” has been popping up as a idiomatic signal in memetic fabric of social media. The idea is that someone with above average intelligence, but not a genius level of intelligence can be described as a midwit. Not a dimwit, yet problematic in thinking and thought processes.
We are at this point in history where the world’s complexity has exceeded our collective capability to process it. In other words, the Internet has created a massive web of midwit signals that drown out Truth. It seems the promise of AI will be to distill the overall input stream that we choose to receive into a high quality signal.
The good news is that our cognitive machinery is wired to be tuned to quality of information vs. quantity of information. The bad news is that that makes us susceptible to counterintuitive persuasion techniques as described by Niro Sivanathan.
As we attempt to make sense in this world filled with midwit signals, it is good to find some high quality signals.
Lately, I’ve been focused on blockchain projects, the next trends in technology, and geopolitical shifts, so some highwit signals that I’ve been following are @naval, @balajis, and @zeihan.
Searching YouTube for their videos reveals a treasure trove for sensemaking. They don’t necessarily agree with each other and the deltas in their world views creates value by stimulating further inquiry.