
The universal decay of collective memory and attention - Hooke
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0474-5
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pmiller2
Fittingly, this was also posted a day or two ago and got little response:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18698855](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18698855)

~~~
epai
This is a theory, but I feel that time of posting and accumulation of
advantage (initial momentum makes it more noticeable, generating even more
momentum) has more to do with a post getting more or less traction than a sort
of collective memory decay, at least for this particular example.

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kaffeemitsahne
> _In France, it is a dozen years now since a president of the republic, long
> since forgotten but at the time still floating on the spectacle 's surface,
> naively expressed his delight at "knowing that henceforth we will live in a
> world without memory, where images chase each other, like reflections on the
> water." Convenient indeed for those in business, and who know how to stay
> there. The end of history gives current-day power a pleasant break. Success
> is absolutely guaranteed in all of power's undertakings, or at least the
> rumor of success._

Debord, 1988

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merlincorey
In case anyone else was unclear what a biexponential[0] function is, it's a
function that is the sum of two exponential values.

[0]
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biexponential](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/biexponential)

~~~
kwoff
(from the link) "In specific". Are my grammar sensors malfunctioning? (I can
see that it's logically the opposite of "in general", and you can say both
"generally" and "specifically", but... :)

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User23
Recency bias is a major factor in performance reviews too, so, as every
salesman knows, if you’re going to slack off do it at the start of the cycle.

~~~
jaabe
This will be a bit of a sidetrack, but I find this interesting. I work for a
Danish muniplacity, and we do BI on a lot of things, one of them is various
degrees of employee performance, but because we're the public sector, we also
do a great deal of research on how these benchmarks are viewed by employees
and managers. We have extremely detailed tools for viewing week-to-week
performance, progression, regression and changes over the year and we have an
entire team dedicated to presenting this data in a way that managers can
understand and use it to help their employees do better.

Only our internal research into the effects of this, shows that things haven't
really changed that much. If you enter a performance review on a good story
about a recent success, that will mean a lot more than your statistical data.
This is true even if a success story is only viewed as a success inside your
own team, but not necessarily by the organisation. So we're spending all these
resources on building BI, that makes it easier for managers to engage their
employees, but it's still the old traditional ways that count, and that means
recency bias as you call it, is still really important, even when it shouldn't
be.

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eecc
Well, you have data to indentify bias when it happens now. You can either use
it to “equalize” distortions in judgement, or bring it as argument to abolish
them

~~~
rightbyte
Given that there are less bias and systematic error in the review tools than
in managers judgement ...

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astazangasta
Although they are only breath, words which I command are immortal -- Sappho,
ca. 600 BC

~~~
starbeast
"But he who thinks that in the written word there is necessarily much which is
not serious, and that neither poetry nor prose, spoken or written, is of any
great value, if, like the compositions of the rhapsodes, they are only recited
in order to be believed, and not with any view to criticism or instruction;
and who thinks that even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what
we know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility
taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven in the
soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and perfection and
seriousness, and that such principles are a man's own and his legitimate
offspring;-being, in the first place, the word which he finds in his own
bosom; secondly, the brethren and descendants and relations of his others;-and
who cares for them and no others-this is the right sort of man; and you and I,
Phaedrus, would pray that we may become like him."

Attributed to Socrates, written down by Plato (in Phaedrus) ca. 360BC.
[http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html](http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html)

Postmodernist comedy has a surprisingly long history, it appears.

~~~
AnonymousPlanet
What an awful translation. You might get away retaining the longwinded
structure of some classic Greek sentences when translating into German. But in
English, this just causes pain for your readers.

~~~
starbeast
“In after-years he liked to think that he had been in Very Great Danger during
the Terrible Flood, but the only danger he had really been in was in the last
half-hour of his imprisonment, when Owl, who had just flown up, sat on a
branch of his tree to comfort him, and told him a very long story about an
aunt who had once laid a seagull’s egg by mistake, and the story went on and
on, rather like this sentence, until Piglet who was listening out of his
window without much hope, went to sleep quietly and naturally, slipping slowly
out of the window towards the water until he was only hanging on by his toes,
at which moment luckily, a sudden loud squawk from Owl, which was really part
of the story, being what his aunt said, woke the Piglet up and just gave him
time to jerk himself back into safety and say, “How interesting, and did she?”
when—well, you can imagine his joy when at last he saw the good ship, The
Brain of Pooh (Captain, C. Robin; 1st Mate, P. Bear) coming over the sea to
rescue him.”

from 'Winnie-the-Pooh', by A.A. Milne. ;)

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spirographer
An earlier version of the paper that is not behind a paywall:

[https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5759bc7886db431d658b7...](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5759bc7886db431d658b7d33/t/5ad7ae01575d1f7d693e8af9/1524084227435/Universal_Decay_Patterns_in_Human_Collective_Memory+%2810%29.pdf)

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richardhod
I find these premises unconvincing: 'Collective memory and attention are
sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the
physical recording of information (cultural memory). ' There are other means
of sustaining collective memory and attention, such as performative actions,
rituals and beliefs (if you can call beliefs channels - I don't have a
definition for channels).

If the first sentence is loose like this, I'm not optimistic for the modelling
and variable construction for the rest of the work. I'll have a close read of
it, but this is a disturbing sign.

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hellofunk
Even after reading the paper, I find their use of the word “biography” to be a
bit strange.

~~~
acqq
It measures if people are interested enough to read somebody’s Wikipedia
entry:

“Current popularity was measured using the number of pageviews received by the
Wikipedia biography [39] of each athlete between J u1y 2016 and June 2017*”.

They want to observe the decay of the interest in order to model it.

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romeisendcoming
This is generational decay. It happens on schedule. We always forget those who
come before us when we can. Now it is extremely easy to do.

