
The Sea Was Not a Mask - longdefeat
https://reallifemag.com/dispatches/the-sea-was-not-a-mask
======
brownbat
The explanation of "jackpot" consumers and the marketing of flow were really
interesting. It's a rambling piece, but worth drawing those out.

I found the theory of why some people believe conspiracies less compelling.
Blaming modernity feels a bit too easy.

My hunch is that there are two loosely related cognitive skills: generating
plausible theories about the world, and determining which are actually likely.

They are orthogonal skill sets... Some people are good at one and bad at the
other.

Maybe we mostly focus on teaching and praising the former and underdevelop the
latter, because we don't treat it as a different skill requiring different
tools. Or... people just have trouble switching between identifying evidence
in support of a theory and switching to criticize it, people get locked in to
crazy theories. Can't stop seeing evidence in favor due to Baader Meinhof
effects.

YouTube should be slipping in some videos on empirical methods, cognitive
biases, and the hard skill of distinguishing plausible theories from likely
ones.

This piece seemed vaguely postmodernist, so I'm not sure the author would
appreciate that solution... You might get fewer people obsessed with both
David Icke and Derrida at the same time.

~~~
StrictDabbler
The author's explanation of why people are vulnerable is certainly abstract
and post-modernist.

Your explanation of why people get locked into conspiracies, though, is
missing desire. People _want_ there to be a masquerade. You've (potentially)
explained why some people don't have the skills to avoid tricking themselves.

The question of why we willingly fool ourselves is very deep. I think post-
modern theory needlessly multiplies entities but there is something to be
examined here.

It's in the same realm as gambling, unfocused fan-fiction, soap operas and
Dragonball Z. Some people really like it when something very unlikely happens.

One of the things that motivates them is this feeling that there really must
be something "more" than what we see or know and another thing that drives
them is the feeling of vindication when they turn out to have been right.

Imagine being so hooked on the feeling of being right whene everybody else is
wrong that you will believe a hundred unlikely things for every likely thing
you accept. "There's just gotta be something else... something we've got
wrong. There just has to be. Look at Galileo! Look at Columbus!" Ridiculous
legends of men who were right against all opposition.

Each ridiculous idea they believe is like another bill fed into a penny-slot
machine. The more unlikely the idea the better.

This gambling dynamic is why flat-earth has come back. It's the most
ridiculous bet on a dark horse that can possibly be imagined.

Literally billions of devices around us operate on the basis of a spherical
globe surrounded by satellites. It is one of the most proven and believed
models that has ever existed in the human span.

If it were wrong, and a flat-earther were one of the few people who had seen
the truth? Winning the actual state lottery couldn't compare to the high such
a person would get from that. For the rest of life, any argument would be
answered "yeah, maybe, but I knew the earth was flat back when everybody was a
round-earther."

But it takes the internet and selection algorithms to produce an alternate
universe in which even the most credulous crackpot can defend flat-earthing
with a straight face.

So when I look at your solution (teach critical thinking) I mostly agree with
it as an immunization against this tendency, but I wonder how well trained
people have to be for it to hold against selection. If I were suddenly in a
world where Google was actively censoring my feeds, how long would it be
before I believed some screwed-up stuff?

I have a friend who is brilliant, trained in law and science and philosophy,
who watches Fox news and believe the President is really turning a corner and
taking the country in the right direction. Before the election he believed
Trump was an unmitigated and incompetent ass... back when that was what Fox
was saying.

I'm not sure we can educate people enough to overcome the desire to choose a
satisfying falsehood.

~~~
brownbat
I like the lottery theory, that's a good add.

Studying cognitive biases might feed that for some... it's kind of the study
of why everyone is wrong.

But maybe there's an axis of novelty or iconoclasm people need too.

I don't really know. After all, mine is just a theory about the dangers of
people making up theories. The irony isn't lost on me, so I'm open to
refinements. (And data... Though not sure how to get it.)

------
joshuaheard
First they came for conspiracy nuts, and I did not speak up because I was not
a conspiracy nut. There are several issues with this approach. You have
YouTube influencing content. So, can they do that for a political candidate?
Other policy debates? They have basic immunity from regulation for being
content-neutral. Do they want to give this up and invite regulation like the
telcos? As a private company, they are free to change their product as they
see fit. But YouTube and other social media have become mass communication
devices, so the issue is bigger than that now.

~~~
ryanackley
One man's conspiracy nut is another man's foreign operative trying to subvert
democracy.

Just my opinion, but I think there is a clear line between a politically
subversive conspiracy theory (i.e. pizzagate, sandy hook was staged, etc.) and
a political commentary I happen to disagree with (i.e. Tucker Carlson).

They have a profit motive to attract as many people as they can to their
platform, I don't believe they would have an intentional political bias.

