It would be nice, though, in a filtered world to occasionally let through a complete random or two, to emulate what happens when strangers strike up conversations at bus stops. I just don’t want to be waiting for the bus *all the time*.

I guess what I’m proposing isn’t any different than real life or the web in that “attention” is an act of filtering everything out but the thing we want to attend to. In a party, we filter out the noise, and the people we’ve met but didn’t click with. On the web, sure, you can experience the “whole web,” but more likely, you follow links from one site to another, which is a form of filtering. Using a search engine is a big form of filtering, where pages are returned that match your current task. Showing you extraneous pages _might_ lead to an interesting discovery, but it’s generally considered a nuisance.

So again, why do we assume that the right way to display people in virtual worlds is to show everyone at once?

if this goes through and the social repercussions will be globally accepted it will lead to more intolerance in the real world, where it is not as easy to filter people in your surrounding.

Things that may happen in the end: People will become absolutely intolerant to any opinion outside their cosmos of ideals. Good thing is, there would not be any more known poverty or starvation in the real world.

Hardly anyone likes to heard about it, so it will be just filtered. Oh right, that even happens today, just not controlled by ever individual. See the TV and Newspaper news? More people died in Africa from starvation than in all past wars together. Thousands got slaughtered by fanatics even there was a UN Presence in the area.

It would also lead to a sorta new kind of Stupidity. If you continue to focus on things you like, your Brain will adapt and you will be less and less interested in other things. That means you can grow dramatically inflexible. Good for all kind of evil marketing stuff.

The resulting world could never be democratic, because no one could understand the other persons point of view. (So you actually could not vote for someone else but yourself). Not that this is new. I guess we are all running towards something like that.

Yay, time for me to set up some filters.

Thus — I would prefer to see the ugly guy, or be the ugly guy to others, on the subway or in the restaurant — than to not be anything at all, except a shell of me and my own interests.

Evolution in learning is an interesting kind of thing in this regard.