
Technology and the death of civilisation - CarolineW
https://medium.com/@josepicardoshs/technology-and-the-death-of-civilisation-5e831b3f8b5#.5gzowbw1k
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There isn't enough discussion of the difference between cause and root cause.

Clearly, technology can't possibly be the cause of old people getting agitated
about how young people are destroying the civilization left for them. That
complaint has been circulating as far back as we can find records.

I suspect we'd be getting closer to root cause if we examined how people
observe other people.

Heinlein has a great idea for a profession in "Stranger in a Strange Land".
There are Witnesses who go through painstaking training to ensure that they
can actually, truly, literally be impartial observers of events. For example,
if asked "what color is that house" they would reply "this side of the house
is white." Most people aren't even aware of all the simplifying assumptions
they're making when they observe the world, which means they can't account for
avoidable mistakes when they think on their observations.

The image of kids looking at their phones instead of the painting is just
that. It's a picture of kids looking at their phones while in the vicinity of
a painting. A single picture tells you nothing about the context in which that
picture was taken, and that's before you start worrying about image
manipulation. I suspect the vast majority of the times when old people get
annoyed at young people are really just people failing to remember that their
observation tells them much less about the situation than they assume.

This framework seems more powerful because it helps explain other things. For
example, I think the reason the "social justice movement", such as it is, is
struggling to be taken seriously is that it's impossible to photograph. The
civil rights movement was easy to explain. All you needed were pictures of
burning crosses, or nooses, or whites/coloreds signs, or police dogs, or fire
hoses. The message didn't get lost in the aggressive filter everyone applies
to their observations. The social justice movement is about much more abstract
things like the 2nd and 3rd order effects of obscure laws or accumulated
subjective experiences. So the only parts you can photograph are people
shouting and/or crying. The message is guaranteed to get lost in the filter,
so it's basically impossible for anyone who's merely observing it to get the
truth.

In the same way, it's impossible to capture what someone is thinking/feeling
when they're using technology. The experience is subjective. You can't tell if
they're asleep with their eyes open, or mindlessly poking colored squares, or
doing homework, or falling in love, or discovering a new perspective. All you
can observe, over and over again, is just a person staring at a screen. The
truth of the situation is not observable, yet we continue to base our
understanding of the truth on our observations.

