Digital Serendipity?

Some fascinating articles and books at the moment about the long term effects of the web's move towards personalization. On the one hand it means the web will deliver more of what you want, the problem is, getting what you want isn't the same as getting what you need. The more our sources of information and inspiration mould themselves around what we already are, the less opportunities we have to grow into something new. The phrase of the moment is 'serendipty' - the chance stumbling on something unsought, but well found.

There is indeed I think a lot to the idea that ever more impressive personalization will limit this, and some have gone so far as to say that a digital world, being definite and algorithm based, just can't provide the distractions and abstractions needed to stumble accidentally on something. But while not saying the current structures won't end up being so restrictive, in my vieww they don't need to. Any truly complex system is open to chaos-style behaviour, where small changes in input result in wild variations in output, and the internet, and even the search and match algorithms of the likes of Google and Facebook, could surely display, or be allowed to display, such behaviour.

Indeed, probably serendipity itself results from accidental pattern matching, where we are thinking of one kind of thing and suddenly spot something similar in a completely unrelated field, achieving a flash of insight which is maybe really a flash of recognition, a realisation of how theold can lead to the new; and pattern matching is what Google etc. are good at. Up to now they have probably been trying to emulate perfect 'directed' pattern matching, focused in one area, but surely there is also the potential (if not probability) for cross-field matching. If for example Google Translate is trained to match words across languages, what would happen if it was fed with a different data set, and tried to extract similar patterns in this new domain. Is this not exactly what the serendipitous brain does?

In fact, what is often portrayed as a bad thing, that even the very people who design and operate these systems are losing true insight into how they work, provides hope, since they may become semi-evolved 'intelligences' in their own right (and i only mean this in so far as excellend pattern matching machines), and provide us with unexpected insight - since what they produce will be unexpected.
So, when it comes to digital serendiptiy, as Google itself suggests, i'm feeling lucky.

better to have believed and lost or not to have believed at all?

One reason for even aetheists not to completely shield their children from Religion, is the idea that like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, it provides some harmless yet comforting fantasies to the young mind, support until it can fully grasp and handle the beautiful yet brutal realities of existance; however, the question then is whether the puncturing of that bubble is overall a worse knock, then not having had the bubble at all.

Without beginning to start the analysis that the topic needs, one piece of psychologic research I read about recently struck me as being perhaps relevent. Ironically putting things into perspective, it had to do with parents in a real nightmare scenario, with a seriously ill child. what was examined was, if, against the odds, the child seemed to be improving, but was still at some (but not too much of a) risk of a relapse, which of two attitudes worked better in terms of the parents' mental well being. First was the quietly optimistic but still very cautious approach of thinking yes, things were better, but wasn't worth getting too excited since weren't out of the proverbial woods yet. The other attitude was basically hallelujah, this was wonderful luck (which of course it was), and best to appreciate and enjoy it for what it was, and not worry about what might yet be. As could be expected, the latter strategy resulted in lower stress levels. As might also be expected if a relapse did occur, then the positive effects immediatey dissappeared, but what is important is the parents mood dropped lower than during the original onset of the illness. Dashed hope really does seem to be worse than no hope at all.

It's like a prisoner's dilemma of the heart - hope for the best, and end up worse, or keep hopes possibly needlessly dampened. Don't fly too low Icarus, let the water weigh down your wings, nor soar too high, lest the sun may burn them. Flying a middle course may sound like the best option, but how can we then reach for the stars?