Extremism and the Curse of Informational Dimensionality
Extremism has been on the rise again in recent years. Several decades ago, economic ideology — fascism versus communism — was the driving force behind right and left extremism. Both ideologies concentrated on how capital and resources were distributed. The differences are immaterial for this article. What is important is that those extreme ideologies led to a clash and a world war because “there can be only one.”
Ironically, both ideologies converged in practice. In communism, a nomenclature that controlled resources and their distribution through state-controlled agents emerged, much like it did in fascism.
The main drivers of extremism were extreme ideology and philosophy — Marx and Engels versus Dollfuss and Gentile, for example. The schools and universities were the main indoctrination places. These two extremes emerged from limited dimensionality, or, in reality, just two dimensions: communism versus fascism. The clash that ensued destroyed both: fascism collapsed immediately, and communism followed.
Nowadays, the problem of rising extremes is way more complicated and has to do with what I call “the curse of informational dimensionality.” In a nutshell, one negative aspect of the World Wide Web has been the multiple dimensions of information. Nowadays, there is no longer true or false information. There are probability distributions of truth values that recipients sample from and then condition on other knowledge and beliefs. Social media uses those as input and, via a sophisticated stochastic process, generates extreme values where subjective good or bad beliefs replace truth or false values.
Through a limiting process, people converge to believe what some “authorities” with millions of followers believe. How is that different from believing in Marx or Gentile? Only the process of indoctrination is different: many decades ago, as already mentioned above, indoctrination took place in schools and universities. Nowadays, it takes place on social media networks.
Our modern system of information dissemination suffers from the curse of informational dimensionality. The information is about a large set of economic, political, geopolitical, and social issues. As the number of dimensions increases, the surface of the n-hypersphere they define goes to zero, and there are no compromises possible; everything is concentrated at the vertices or the extremes of the inscribed n-hypercube. Any compromises are only apparent or “transitory”.
There is no easy way to deal with the curse of informational dimensionality without violating the right to free speech. Here is the paradox: free speech eventually leads to extremism. This is the paradox a modern and technologically advanced civilization must solve to avoid collapse. Do I have the answers? Oh hell no!
