Individualism and Community

We started with systems that allowed everyone to express themselves. We had to create order to we added a popularity contest on top of these expressions (likes, re-tweets and the like)

winner
   |
   |
   |       |
   |       |
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Popularity Contest
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|   |  | | | | |
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Individualism Foundation
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And then people stopped expressing themselves fully and just wanted to win the popularity contest. So they placed a filter on top of what they thought and that created the following situation:

         winner
            |
            |
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Popularity Contest
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           /\
          /  \
         /    \
        /      \
       /        \
      /          \
     /            \
    /              \
   /                \
  /                  \
 /                    \
/                      \
      Filter Overlay
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|   |  | | | | |      |
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Individualism Foundation
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Now people take their individual ideas, pass them through a filter in order to win the popularity contest. We never get to see anything else other than what has been deemed to be "popular".

The benefits of individualism were totally lost. Heterogeneous ideas are the critical inputs into creation. But we have turned everything into a competition. Even research. NSF introduced peer review to handle the incoming flow of applications. The NSF has been on a journey to shrinking exploration to the extent that only sure things can win.