@ Laeserin
2024-06-11 15:29:22
# Laeserin's theory of assortative clustering
## I was nerding again
I posted a wiki breadcrumb trail of events, today, from [entropy](https://wikifreedia.xyz/entropy/laeserin@getalby.com), to [information entropy](https://wikifreedia.xyz/information-entropy/laeserin@getalby.com), to [social media entropy](https://wikifreedia.xyz/social-media-entropy/laeserin@getalby.com).
(Source for the last entry in that list: I made it up.)
The more mathematically-inclined npubs immediately saw the usefulness in such a score, probably because it can be so very difficult to find anyone writing anything particularly complex or "deep" about one's own topics of interest. So, that is a subset of npubs that personally suffers from the difficulty of finding such slender trees within the increasingly vast, wild forest of Nostr notes.
## Thar be dragons
However, this sort of score is a proxy-measure for [general intelligence](https://wikifreedia.xyz/general-intelligence/laeserin@getalby.com), so there is obvious nervousness about measuring something that many people think it is immoral to measure, and that others do not believe is an actual thing. (Despite the fact that we are quickly developing artificial copies of the organic version and you can't copy something that is nonexistent... but I digress.)
There is always the fear of "intellectual elitism", whereby the worth, or value, of some particular person or group of people is determined by measuring their intelligence. This fear is not unfounded, as there are many amoral people who view humans in this reductive manner, but fear of amoral people being wicked about something is not a sufficient reason to cut off entire fields of study. That would, in fact, bar us from thinking much about anything.
## More is not always better
I suppose the assumption would be that a higher SME would always be considered better, but this is a fallacy based upon the overemphasis on intelligence in our particular culture and time.
Most people would actually prefer the content of someone similar to themselves, who is conversing on a level they can easily understand and respond to, without feeling intimidated or bored. Humans tend to associate with those more like themselves (i.e. assortatively), and don't tend to associate more than one SD out on the [IQ](https://wikifreedia.xyz/IQ/laeserin@getalby.com) curve, in either direction, as they find the experience confusing, tiresome or alienating.
What is "better", in other words, is subjective and dependent upon the person asked, which is why SME scores make sense, but not necessarily SME rankings. In the same way that a sky-high WoT score can actually make an account less-attractive because you might assume that they're #NostrElite, a sky-high SME score will assume to represent nerdiness or a tendency to verbosity.
## We will self-sort
That is why the largest npubs are, by design, never going to be the most information-dense ones, and the most information-dense ones will tend to be treated like spam, by many other npubs. This same spam-effect will hit the least information-dense ones, which is why we can expect each cohort to eventually branch off into their preferred [nevent](https://wikifreedia.xyz/nevent/laeserin@getalby.com), [relay](https://wikifreedia.xyz/relay/laeserin@getalby.com), client and hashtag realms, where they can be themselves without feeling put-upon by other npubs' negative reactions.
Academic centers, such as universities and startup hubs were developed in order to support this self-sorting effect, by allowing those to the right-end of the bell curve to congregate with the like-minded and have conversations with people who don't treat them as if they are space aliens. However, it carried the negative effect that those people were then clustered geographically, where they eventually lost sight of the day-to-day issues that effected the majority of the populace. Their isolation made them insular and ignorant, and fostered the very "intellectual elitism" that creates so much worry, now.
## Make it a feature, not a bug
[Nostr](https://wikifreedia.xyz/nostr/laeserin@getalby.com) solves for the worst effects of this problem, by keeping all of the conversation within one data structure and profile silo, so that those from one group will regularly have contact with the others, and frenships (and romances, who knows?) can take root at the margins. Nostr, in other words, recreates the social mixing common to a village, where the groups are largely separate when deep in discussion or at work, but interact incidentally when moving around in shops, attending church services, festivals, or joining sports clubs or choirs.
In closing, I would say that the concern is completely justified, but a universal communications protocol is the best way to alleviate such concern and have all reap some reward for making the relationship structure of humankind more transparent.
One man's treasure is another man's trash, and everything happily reverts to the mean.
The End.