Is There a Difference Between Collectivism and Individualism?

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In Japan or Norway, people feel oppressed by the collective. They don't feel like they can express themselves as freely. And so I think that the division between social norms and personal values kind of solves this because there are collective things that are part of our free expression. Half of sociality is amplifying the individual, right? Or unlocking the individual. There's another half of sociality, which is like all the rules and the norms and like, and you don't really want to amplify them with technology too much. You don't want to clamp down even harder. This is why people are afraid of things like Chinese social credit,. Because they imagine a kind of dystopia where the tech

In episode 63 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joe Edelman.

Joe developed the meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing.com, then co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, and coined the term “Time Well Spent” for a family of metrics adopted by teams at Facebook, Google, and Apple. Since then, he's worked on the philosophical underpinnings for new business metrics, design methods, and political movements. The central idea is to make people's sources of meaning explicit, so that how meaningful or meaningless things are can be rigorously accounted for. His previous career was in HCI and programming language design.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro (yes Daniel is trying a new intro format)

* (01:30) Joe’s origin story

* (07:15) Revealed preferences and personal meaning, recommender systems

* (12:30) Is using revealed preferences necessary?

* (17:00) What are values and how do you detect them?

* (24:00) Figuring out what’s meaningful to us

* (28:45) The decline of spaces and togetherness

* (35:00) Individualism and economic/political theory, tensions between collectivism/individualism

* (41:00) What it looks like to build spaces, Habitat