Dilution of expertise in the rise and fall of collective innovation

Abstract

Diversity drives both biological and artificial evolution. A prevalent assumption in cultural evolution is that the generation of novel features is an inherent property of a subset of the population (e.g., experts). In contrast, diversity—the fraction of objects in the corpus that are unique—exhibits complex collective dynamics such as oscillations that cannot be simply reduced to individual attributes. Here, we explore how a popular cultural domain can rapidly expand to the point where it exceeds the supply of subject-specific experts and the balance favours imitation over invention. At this point, we expect diversity to decrease and information redundancy to increase as ideas are increasingly copied rather than invented. We test our model predictions on three case studies: early personal computers and home consoles, social media posts, and cryptocurrencies. Each example exhibits a relatively abrupt departure from standard diffusion models during the exponential increase in the number of imitators. We attribute this transition to the “dilution of expertise.” Our model recreates observed patterns of diversity, complexity and artifact trait distributions, as well as the collective boom-and-bust dynamics of innovation.

Is Disruption Decreasing, or Is It Accelerating?

“…The other e®ects observed in the study À À À the decrease in unique words, as well as changes in word frequency À À À appear to be mostly due to the accelerated growth in the number of publications. This is seen across modern information in general [19,20], as shown by the word count in English-language books over time [21,22] in Fig. 3(a).…”

“…Although we do not fully understand why things grow exponentially, many technological advances can accelerate cultural changes [23] and promote the need for novel words [20] (Fig. 3(a), inset).…”

Cultural Evolution, Disinformation, and Social Division

“…Through automated data collection and fitting the model to data in order to estimate social conformity, stakeholders will have quantitative evidence for recognizing boundaries to be avoided, in different media, for their specific strategies. Stakeholders can take it upon themselves to monitor their local information spaces for the spread of disinformation and for early warnings of potential collapse of meaningful discourse through excessive social signaling or conformity (Duran-Nebreda et al, 2022). More broadly, we look to care for the future and its safe limits (Barfuss et al, 2020; Rockström et al, 2009)—in this case for digitally mediated social conformity, beyond which beneficial social learning would decline (Bak-Coleman et al, 2022; Ciampaglia et al, 2018).…”

Punctuated equilibrium at 50: Anything there for evolutionary anthropology? Yes; definitely

“…100 In multiple contexts, contemporary cultural evolution appears to be undergoing punctuated change. If we view these developments from the perspective of modeling social learning, 92,[101][102][103] anticipating the general trajectory of this revolution may well be feasible. In other words, with modeling, evolutionary anthropology can move the concept of punctuated evolution forward with an entirely different toolset, in much the same way that molecular genetics has expanded our understanding of punctuations in species evolution.…”