You may have witnessed feedback in a concert or when your speaker output in a live chat feeds back into your microphone input. A high pitched noise slowly gets louder, then raises exponentially until someone pulls the plug and suddenly a breakdown of signal strength occurs.
You have experienced a bubble.
Being a designer of digital filters, I want to raise awareness of how destructive these bubbles may be to democracy and diversity of opinions - contributing to instability and irrationality.
Stockmarkets, search ranking algos, facebook likes, reddit/mastodon upvoting, opinion polls, “news” in general - all have their respective feedback channels built in.
Feedback is established when past voting results (or price feeds) are visible to those voting in the future.
This may seem benign. It is not. It creates a exponential response. It risks getting chaotic and tends toward bifurcations/splitting. The complexity of not one but many such feedback channels will be explored next.
Welcome. I thought of constructive use cases, after all my own designs are supposed to be stable. You mention impulse response and time constants - but for now I want to address a broader public.
I want to raise awareness of the ways feedback is managed in undemocratic ways. Insider: D. Farmer said: "It is (so called) risk management that causes instability in these markets " The crucial question is that of foreknowledge, or, in dsp terms feed foreward paths, or, in finance moral hazard aka foreknowledge that big boyz can avoid responsibity. I’ll leave that for later, too.
Have a nice one.