The previous article talks about the "Security Knowledge" Series (2) Money - the most amazing consciousness of mankind. When it comes to money, this collective consciousness establishes an effective market. The price system encourages people to divide labor and collaborate on a large scale.

In addition to money, there is also a lot of knowledge. ***Consciousness simply means unified viewpoints and opinions. As far away as the formation of the country, laws, and morals, as close as the fashionable clothing, music, and novel styles in life, they are all conscious, and even aesthetic standards are also conscious.

Westerners and Easterners have different aesthetic standards. The modern Chinese people and the Chinese people in the Tang Dynasty have very different aesthetic standards for women.

So how did this kind of consciousness evolve? This question may not be something I can answer at the moment. It involves anthropology and sociological writings. However, this article would like to talk about my thinking from the perspective of the characteristics of the evolution of personal knowledge. If there is anything wrong, please correct me.

I think the evolution of consciousness has three characteristics.

Why are Nobel Prizes always awarded to those who made scientific achievements decades ago? Because whether a scientific research result is correct or not, it takes a long time to reach a consensus in the academic circle.

The establishment of any kind of political knowledge is a long-term game process. There will be a window period for most people to accept new things.

When a new viewpoint or knowledge appears, its correctness has not been experienced over time, and it often conflicts with old viewpoints and knowledge.

The theory of relativity proposed by Einstein challenged the definition of time and space in Newtonian mechanics, and the discovery of quantum mechanics challenged Einstein's assumption that the speed of light is the fastest speed in the universe.

The number of people who accept any new knowledge is limited at the beginning, but it will evolve over time.

At the launch of Apple’s first-generation mobile phone, iPhone 1, in 2007, Jobs proudly said that they had redefined mobile phones. However, at that time, smart phones did not have any impact on traditional mobile phones. At that time, they were recognized as the most popular mobile phones. A good mobile phone is Nokia's N95. Although the iPhone is already a revolutionary product, it still took four years for the mainstream public to accept it. It was not until 2010 that Apple's fourth-generation mobile phone, iPhone 4, was recognized by most consumers. NOKIA Only then did he fall off the altar.

Therefore, one of the characteristics of consciousness is that it has a delayed effect.

Why do commercials use entertainment stars? Why do famous quotes have greater impact than what ordinary people say?

From a rational and logical perspective. The recognition of a product by entertainment stars does not mean that the general public will also recognize it. Opinions expressed by celebrities, especially those outside the celebrity's field of expertise, are not necessarily professional. But why are we still affected? Because the human brain is better at finding correlations than finding causal relationships between things. This is the nature of human beings as social animals, which leads to the malleability of human consciousness.

When we buy something on e-commerce, we can read other people’s reviews online. Others’ judgments of the product will affect our own judgment, but this influence is not as strong as the recommendations of friends we know around us. . Everyone will spread their opinions to those around them, so public knowledge is malleable. This is the logic behind the rise of Pinduoduo.

To put it simply, the network effect is a positive correlation between the value of a network and the square of the number of people using it. As shown below.

(Value = K * Number of people^2)

This effect is also called the fax machine effect. Because the value of a fax machine is related to the number of people who use it, the more people who use it, the more connections there are, and the greater the value of the fax machine.

The same is true for *** consciousness. When only a few people agree with it at the beginning, it develops very slowly. As the number of people who agree with it increases, the more mainstream views are accepted faster.

The spread speed of short videos on Douyin will become faster and faster as the number of people watching them falls asleep. An academic paper in the scientific community will spread faster and faster as the number of citations increases. Once recognized, the popularity of mantras in our lives will also develop faster and faster with the increase in the number of users.

For example, the number of uses of the index has shown an exponential explosion in recent years.

In this article, we talked about the three characteristics of the evolution of knowledge: delay, scalability, and network effects. So what will the future of knowledge evolution look like? Let’s talk again next week~

Let’s talk about the “*** Knowledge” series (1) The origin of ***knowledge

Let’s talk about the “*** Knowledge” series (1) 2) Money - the most amazing knowledge of mankind