Information Diversity and Possibility Space
Why Twitter, Substack, Telegram, and Foreign Media are so essential to news analysis.
Over many years I have been working on an important personal project: To unwind all of the brainwashing that I endured in my youth, to free and open my mind to the global information space, and secure a better opportunity of seeing and understanding the world around me. This is particularly true in the present world, which is undergoing many dramatic historic changes…I don’t want to miss out on the show!
Thus far, at age 51, I have gone rather far down this rabbit hole, and I’ve been planning to write it all down so that I can share the principles and methods I’ve learned along the way. I often use social media like Facebook for this purpose, with posts that I only share with “Friends,” and whom I use as sounding boards to find ways to explain these ideas more clearly, and perhaps to help them along the same path (if they desire), or even better to find compatriots who can teach me something new. This has been a valuable experience, and I’ve learned quite a lot about what kinds of approaches are effective, and which are not. I’ve also learned that many people simply do not want to go down this path, and try to accept that fact without judging them harshly.
In recent weeks I’ve had some exchanges with some Facebook friends who are convinced that Elon Musk is an evil villain, an abuser, control freak, authoritarian, propagandist, liar, hypocrite, Putin puppet, and so on. And they firmly believe that Musk has turned the “X” platform into a dangerous space full of conspiracy theorists, wingnuts, lunatics, abusers, and worse. They deny that the government was censoring content on Twitter in the past, vilify the journalists who reported it as Musk bootlickers, and yet at the same time they call for more censorship (without irony).
On the other hand, my use of Twitter, and the value it provides to me in my personal quest, have increased dramatically since Musk’s takeover (I’ll explain further below). But, how can I explain it to my friends who have fallen prey to the anti-Musk hysteria that spread through much of the western mediascape? When I say that I find exceptional value in X/Twitter because it offers diverse information, they say “oh, so you trust Elon Musk!” But they clearly have missed my point, and I have struggled in several long comment threads to explain my thinking…so far, it hasn’t worked.
Yesterday one Facebook friend, an older academic with similar views as my own on a variety of subjects, whom I admire, recently wrote:
…you rightly critiqued the billionaire owned “press”, but the notion that somehow this constant clicking of the keyboard on meta or x is a “free press” alternative gave me a giggle — as if zuck and musk were somhow different from bezos’ WAPO.
Of course I felt a bit disappointed, since I really do believe that this friend is intelligent enough to understand my take on this subject. But somehow I had failed to convey my thinking. Again.
So I’ve made another attempt, and I’m trying to break it down as simple as I can possibly make it. It could be that my brain is just a bit strange or complex, and this is my fundamental challenge to overcome the resulting communication barriers. So I figured I would share it here, on Medium, so that I can link to it again in the future.
Ok, so what is my point? Here is how I tried to break it down (let me know in the comments if any part of this doesn’t make sense):
(1) The media space is comprised of information streams, which are disseminated on various media platforms by particular purveyors.
(2) Every information stream is comprised of bundles of information.
(3) Each bundle can be unpacked and dissected into its essential “nuggets” (statements of fact, logical constructs, inferences, rationales, implications, etc.).
(4) At this stage, these nuggets do not hold any truth value. Nuggets can be true, false, or neither, such considerations are to be considered at a later stage of analysis.
(5) Information diversity is the number of distinctly unique nuggets “N” one gathers from available information streams (obviously if they are not distinct, then it is not diverse).
(6) Diverse nuggets may be combined, mixed, and matched in every possible way. (Making sense of these various combinations is a later step.)
(7) All of the possible unique combinations of nuggets comprise what we might call a “possibility space.”
(8) The size of the possibility space is the number of distinct ways of combining the various nuggets into all possible bundles. This size can be thought of as the number of unique bundles formed by all possible nugget combinations (including subsets).
(9) The size of possibility space increases combinatorially, like N!, as the number of diverse nuggets N increases.
(10) The combinatorial explosion as the number of diverse nuggets increases is faster than exponential. A diversity of 2 gives just 2!=2*1=2 possible combinations. 3 gives 3!=3*2*1=6 possible combinations. A diversity of 4 gives 4!=4*3*2*1=24 possible combinations. Once one reaches a diversity of 10, there are 10!=3,628,800 unique combinations.
(1)-(10) lays out part of the rationale behind the preparatory data collection stage that precedes the analysis. The principle conclusion one can draw at this point is that diversity is the key to opening possibility space. Even a small increase in diversity dramatically expands the size of possibility space. Our main goal at the initial stage is to generate the largest possibility space by increasing nugget diversity.
Armed with this background, my purpose in following diverse information streams like those propagated on Twitter can be stated very simply: To increase N, and thereby dramatically increase N!. And X/Twitter does a magnificent job of it. This is in spite of the fact that we know Elon Musk culls the possibility space from time to time (though we don’t know the extent of this culling). Obviously Twitter should not be relied upon as a sole platform for that reason. However, I think it is vastly better than pre-Elon Twitter, when the federal government was actively involved in censoring information streams and limiting key nuggets that would allow us to better understand what is going on in the world.
Twitter is just one of many. There is also Telegram, and Substack, and the vast foreign press. While many Americans are still stuck in a tiny binary possibility space of just 2, I find myself swimming in a vast universe of literally countless possibilities. This makes communications between us rather difficult. But perhaps laying out my methodological reasoning as I’ve done here may help others to understand? Or maybe it will just confuse them more? Does the math part make their eyes glaze over? We’ll see…
