Re the comments about flags: the messy tug-of-war that you're seeing between upvoting, flagging, and moderating is what always happens with this kind of story, so if you're drawing any significant conclusion about HN from this one case, it's probably exaggerated: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
While I have you: before commenting, make sure you're up to date on the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They've changed significantly in the last year. Here's the kind of discussion we want: thoughtful, curious, substantive. Here's the kind we don't want: snarky, reflexive, attacking. Make sure you can follow the core rule—"Be kind."—and its corollary, which hasn't yet made it into the doc: "If you're hot under the collar, please cool down before posting." That's in your interest for two reasons: your views will be better represented, and you'll help to preserve the all-too-fragile commons that we all depend on.
(Also, for those who haven't seen any of my annoying mentions of this yet, large threads on HN are currently paginated for performance reasons, which means you need to click More at the bottom of the thread to get to the rest of the comments—or like this:
How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?
I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself.
I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster"
Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers.
Apply this analogy to literally any insular bubble, it applies as equally to /r/thedonald as it does to the emaciated Che Guevara larpers that cry thinking about ringing their favourite pizza place.
Not more of this anti-toaster-fucking bigotry!
It is _completely_ normal for a grown man to seek a consensual, carnal relationship with any electrical appliance of his choosing.
Just because you can't understand the deep, intimate bond that comes from inserting your genitals into a toaster, it doesn't give you the right to shame others.
I've shared your post with my good friends at the Toaster Fucker Support Group. Expect to get doxxed within the next 48 hours, bigot.
The irony of this ahistorical claim is that it comes very close to "Make America great again".
Think about the Vietnam War. The civil rights era. The McCarthy era. The list is almost endless. The Civil War, of course. The US has almost always had major polarization. If anything, the internet reveals what had been hidden by the whitewashed corporate Big Three TV network monopoly, which was itself an historical anomaly.
You know the Pulitzer Prize for journalism? Well, Joseph Pulitzer himself was unapologetically partisan. As was William Randolph Hearst, et al. The whole idea of "objective journalism" is not much more than a naive blip.
I agree, the difference now is that we have direct access to the information, it doesn't have to filter through a journalist now. All these twitter/facebook/youtube bans are trying to put a genie back in a bottle, Parler is gaining steam and Bitchute recently hit its funding goals.
Also, yeah, the term yellow journalism refers to Pulitzer's rags. Completely on board with that as well.
Of course it's not that one-sided. Let's not forget that the same technology that provides a safe haven for toaster fuckers also enables people with more sane, progressive yet equally niche ideas to find like-minded peers and escape the problematic offline environments and tribalism they may have been brought up in.
Continuing the analogy, it comes down to the impossibility that such tools only be used for good. We can't approach 100% without draconian censorship, but we can probably get to 90% with better education. Apparently we're currently around 50%.
I would add that the pandemic make us skip the part of telling friends.
And the invention of twitter... most sane people don't talk. If they ever say anything, it is too common sensual to be retweeted. But if someone say something explosive it got exponentially retweeted. The character limit also eliminate the possibility of any nuance in position.
You certainly did not have to live with those around you before the internet, and were sometimes very much encouraged not to.
It isn't like the LGBTQ+ community was treated well. It was perfectly acceptable to not hire a queer school teacher, nor was it such a bad thing for students to shun a queer classmate. Or you could look at marriage between "races" and the slurs you got from them. A core teaching of a number of churches is to surround yourself with other believers instead of the non-believer next door. And certainly make sure you fit into your gender roles.
Best not to have communist or socialist leanings in the 50's, nor be asian in the US in the 40's. In so many places, it was outright dangerous to have dark skin.
Sometimes you would just accept those around you because that was all you had access to, which is true... so long as they weren't in the wrong group lest you be treated like the minority.
Social media amplifies some bubbles, but it also breaks a few and some things are more difficult to ignore.
I dunno. The UK got whipped into an online frenzy prior to the Brexit vote. Notably, there was possible Russian interference during that campaign on Twitter, similar to the US [1]. And Bolsonaro got elected in Brazil, largely due to manipulation on WhatsApp. Roughly 47% of the country uses WhatsApp, and of the top fifty images circulating at the time of the election, only four were real [2].
Social media has proven itself to have massive impact on the zeitgeist, and it has been weaponized the world over to serve the interests of those willing to manipulate others in order to further their own (often misanthropic) goals.
Most of the Russian stories were pure election stories, there is almost no merit to it at all.
This is actually one thing I don't understand about the alleged progressive side and many people share this view. You could be made to believe basically anything the same way Trump supporters believe a communist overtake of the US is imminent.
Furthermore the support these stories got from intelligence agencies point to very serious problems that do indeed influence democracy in a very bad way, far worse than Putin can imagine in his dreams. Of course it might put a smile on his face, that much is understood.
True that the zeitgeist has influence, but it is mainly driven by western companies, not by the Russian government. Aside from the language barrier you cannot name one talking point this alleged Russian propaganda contained.
You do understand the implication if you decry any opposition to EU integration as Russian interference? Because any political discourse stops right there with you.
No, there was honest dissatisfaction with the EU in Britain. That might be wrong or not, but the Russian thing just made people reinforce their views, because that actually makes sense now.
Russians, seriously...
Brazil is another story here, although I think the facts have to be checked.
Well, I don't know how honest you'd call The Sun. Obviously, it wasn't Russia - but equally obviously, the whole euro-skepticism thing was hardly an organic phenomenon. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single issue of a right wing British tabloid published in the last ten years that didn't have at least one article in it about how bad the EU is.
Influencing democracy is older than democracy - I think the thing that's causing such a furore is that the internet is lowering the barriers for this kind of yellow-press skulduggery, to the point that losers like Steve Bannon start to have actual power.
It was and still is purely organic. The entire establishment aggressively suppressed euroskepticism of any kind for decades to the level that it required a total outsider, who was himself frozen out completely, to create an entirely new political party twice and bring them to winning enough votes to ensure the Conservatives couldn't ignore it anymore.
You say "the Sun" as if a single tabloid the vast majority of all powerful people and decision makers don't even read was some decisive factor. Now consider the total and complete opposition of the BBC, the Guardian, the Economist, the Financial Times, the Times, the Civil Service, dominant factions in both political factions, etc.
To say Brexit wasn't organic is to innuendo into existence some vast but vague conspiracy. "Obviously" it wasn't Russia you say, but it had to be someone right? Isn't this the same sort of rhetoric that has lead to the Capitol just being stormed? Isn't it far more likely that parts of the British press reported bad stories about the EU for decades simply because there were bad stories to report, as you'd expect there to be? And reporting stories about governments is the sort of thing a free press is supposed to do?
Do you live in the UK? It's hard for non-residents to understand the impact of The Sun. It's the most read newspaper by far - having a greater readership than all the other papers you mentioned combined.
After the victory of John Major in 1992, the Sun ran the headline 'IT'S THE SUN WOT WON IT', a line that's since become a sort of mantra in english politics - nobody has won an election since without the support of The Sun.
The second most read is the Daily Mail, another euroskeptic paper. In fact, if you look down the list of papers by readership [1], you can see the euroskeptic press (Telegraph, Mail, Murdoch papers) is almost the entirety of newspapers that are in circulation.
I'm not saying there's some vast conspiracy. I'm just saying that Rupert Murdoch is not a fan of large, big-state regulatory projects, and as a result, his papers (which include the Times, for instance) have followed an anti-EU line. He traditionally takes a very active role in this kind of editorial decision making, and is very public about this fact.
Obviously, the establishment in england are traditionally liberal, internationalist, and the argument for Brexit is a hard sell on pragmatic grounds for obvious reasons - and that's why the vast majority of powerful people were against Brexit, and it took 'outsiders' to push the campaign through.
However, these 'outsiders' were able to do so because they knew the issue sold well with both conservative core demographics and swing voters. And, if you think that your average midlands swing voter would have opinions about supra-national trade standards without some serious narrative building, I have a bridge to sell you.
Not any more but I used to. Yes the Sun has a lot of readers compared to the FT. None of them are the sorts of people who are anywhere even close to power or influence, except in the vague way that any large group of people has power in a democracy.
You do have to be careful not to assume forwards causation. The argument that the British people dislike the EU because the successful parts of the press publishes negative stories about it can also be rephrased as, many people dislike the EU and successful newspapers don't ignore that. That is people's views drive newspaper coverage, not the other way around.
if you think that your average midlands swing voter would have opinions about supra-national trade standards without some serious narrative building, I have a bridge to sell you
But if you think the EU is actually only about supra-national trade standards, then I have a bridge to sell you too ;)
If the EU was just a European ISO that issued standards on goods labelling nobody would have ever cared, you're correct. It's obviously nothing even close to that, and very keen on trade standards being even less of what it does in future.
> None of them are the sorts of people who are anywhere even close to power or influence,
Isn't that exactly the point? Brexit happened because of a referendum where normal people got a vote.
> That is people's views drive newspaper coverage, not the other way around.
I think if this was true, nobody would bother printing them. It's not like they make much money. I'm sure there's an element of organic xenophobia that would make people sympathetic to the EU free movement idea, but I don't think that's enough to create a demand for daily updates on how 'bonkers brussels bureaucrats ban bent bannanas!' (a genuine story).
I don't think anybody ever has picked up a paper because they were dying to get the details about that particular scoop - and honestly, that was one of the most memorable ones.
I can see some grounds on which Euroscepticism was organic in england, but I also have absolutely no doubt that such an idea would never have been successful without the amount of media support it got.
I don't think anybody ever has picked up a paper because they were dying to get the details about that particular scoop - and honestly, that was one of the most memorable ones.
That was over a decade ago yet you remember it and are still talking about it. Obviously that was quite the scoop, which is exactly what newspapers love and how they make money.
A free press loves embarrassing governments by showing them doing stupid stuff. The press in Europe is a mockery of a free press because too many journalists at some point decided that the EU is a morally and ideologically pure vision of the future, so they just stopped reporting on all the bad stuff it does even when it'd make for interesting stories, whilst continuing to do such reports on their local governments. Except in the UK, where parts of the press retained their traditional role.
I think if this was true, nobody would bother printing them. It's not like they make much money.
Left wing super-pro-EU papers often don't indeed. Other papers do make money, plenty enough to justify making them. The Daily Mail made £72 million in profits in 2020 despite COVID. The Guardian bled money and announced job losses.
Political union was a stupid idea, Europeans all have different values that I doubt can be reconciled for the sake of good governance. I doubt the average German cares what a French cheese is called or what the dimensions of the wheel are, as long as it's safe to eat. Similarly, the average Frenchman gives absolutely zero shits about what's happening in Germany as long as there aren't troops forging through the Ardennes.
That and the structure of the EU government is a mess, the parliament has precisely zero impact on decision making and everything is run by the unelected bureaucrats in Belgium.
I get the argument, but I think if you look at the history of small nations sandwiched between large ones, you draw the opposite conclusion.
The UK has essentially walked away from a position of power in a very large nation, to take a position as a small nation on the periphery.
That might be fine for ten years, it might even be fine for fifty - but inevitably, the difference in negotiating power between the UK and its neighbors will show, to the UK's detriment.
It's already been showing in the brexit negotiations, where the EU held essentially all the cards.
What an interesting conclusion to draw. I wonder where you get your news from.
The UK/EU deal isn't perfect but Norway and Switzerland already pricked their ears up and senior politicians in both countries are now publicly questioning why they can't have the same sort of deal. The EU backed down on many things they'd previously claimed were requirements, like the ECJ. And the UK has signed over 60 trade deals in preparation for leaving.
There's a sort of assumption here that might makes right. But the richest countries in the world are all small ones: Switzerland, Singapore, etc. Meanwhile empires spent most of the 20th century collapsing, often due to internal corruption and decay.
I first thought about the problem when I read about the history of the Kashmir region, but actually, it's pretty universal in history. Ask any Mexican about how it is to be the neighbor of a much more powerful polity. Or a Lebanese person. Or an Okinawan. Or an Irish person.
I don't really know the details of the deal, but it seems to me that even if you do get a good deal at one point, the fact is, the UK has very little negotiating power in comparison to the EU. If the EU decided, much like the USA decided with Japan in the 80's, that the UK should sign an unfavourable deal like the Plaza Accord, the UK would be able to do very little but sign it.
Obviously, as you've pointed out, there are a ton of countries that, for some time, step their way around all the pitfalls of this kind of position. But none of them are as large as the UK.
So it turns out that we were able to test this theory EU supporters have about overwhelming negotiating power much faster than anyone anticipated, in the form of bulk purchasing of vaccines.
This is a perfect example where the EU should have totally crushed the UK by using its supposedly superior size and strength, according to size=power theory. And yet what we see is the opposite.
The EU demanded that individual nations buy collectively through the Commission. The Commission is run by diversity hires: half the commissioners had to be women, by demand of von der Leyen. They then moved way too slowly, didn't approve vaccines quickly (and still haven't), didn't order enough and now EU countries are at the back of the queue as a result. The first German to be vaccinated with German technology received their jab in ... the UK. The collective buying operation has since collapsed, with Germany running to Russia to try and acquire some of the Sputnik vaccine.
When it comes to bureaucracies, size does not equal power. Size does not equal benefits. Size equals incompetence, lethargy and internal decay. The EU is run by people who failed upwards their entire careers. They insisted they be given power over vaccines even though the EU has no formal treaty-defined role in healthcare, and then they screwed it up on a massive scale.
Oh dear. I suppose you think Boris Johnson got to where he was by his sharp intellect? Or does he also qualify as a diversity hire, on the basis that his family tree is more a family strongly-connected graph?
On the other hand, perhaps you are seeing the brilliance of british leadership in the coronavirus numbers, which are of course, neck and neck with other great nations, like the US, and Brazil.
Johnson won the London mayorship, leadership of his party and then an election (by a landslide), all of which were open and competitive contests. Love him or loathe him, he got to be PM by fighting for it: it wasn't handed to him on a plate. Far from it. His own colleague Michael Gove famously stabbed him in the back to stop him becoming PM on a prior occasion!
van der Leyen got to be head of the EU via an entirely secret process, about which we only have one public piece of evidence as to how it works: the claim that the next president of the Commission had to be a woman. She won nothing whatsoever to get there. Then she insisted that half of all Commissioners be women: this is a matter of public record. In theory she doesn't even get to influence the choice of Commissioners, that's meant to be up to the country, but the reality of the EU often doesn't seem to match what the treaties say.
COVID doesn't really respond to political leadership. That's one of the few things we can say about it with certainty. None of the interventions tried so far have any statistical correlation with healthcare outcomes. Vaccination programmes are quite responsive to politics, on the other hand (whether COVID will respond to vaccines is another topic, but the manufacturing and rollout are within the scope of human control).
> COVID doesn't really respond to political leadership. That's one of the few things we can say about it with certainty.
You clearly live in a parallel reality, where east asia does not exist, where there isn't a direct and obvious relation between leaders who made light of COVID (Johnson, Trump, Bolsanaro) and horrible casualty figures, and where the population of british people named 'Dave' has more talent than the entire population of british women.
Honestly, mandating 50 percent of commissioners are women seems very reasonable. 50 percent of the population are women, so it makes sense that they should be proportionally represented. That's called democracy.
For the record, I'm not a big EU fan. But I also live in the real world, and on that planet, the fact that the last two male prime ministers of england (and diverse cabinet members) were in the same school, the same (small) social club, and probably share more than a few second cousins, is an outcome that would be so incredibly unlikely in a fair and competitive system that if it did happen, reasonable people would call foul play.
If you still think it's a fair and competitive system that selects for talent if this kind of ridiculous anomaly happens on a regular basis, then you're a dupe. If, moreover, you think it's a fair and competitive system when nobody even claims it is fair, or competitive, or about talent, then you're a moron of such rare and unique quality that you're basically redefining the word.
Social Media did not create division.
Internet did not create division.
TV did not create division.
They only amplify it. US was divided long before the creation of Internet. That baseline were far higher than other countries. Compared to other countries Internet definitely has its impact, but the baseline was small it isn't as obvious.
Let's put some number into it.
Division Score of US is 100, Internet Usage as a Multiplier, US also has one of the highest Internet usage ( especially with Social Media ) around the world. if you put that as 10. You get a total of 1000.
Division in Country A is 50, Internet usage as 4 ( If you take social media ads revenue split per capita between US and other countries as an indicator ), you have 200.
Maybe it is affected by the number of people on the internet. Back in my initial internet troll days, you could go on pretty much any forum and know you would be treated fairly even if you were a dickhead.
Now you can start whole blood feuds talking about pineapple on pizza.
My money would be on a more homogeneous culture. Look at somewhere like Australia, the Scandinavian countries or NZ where we pretty much share our attitudes with the most of the others in the country.
As opposed to the US where you're pretty much divided on whether you grew up in the city, suburbs or rural and then again on state. A Californian is wildly different from a Texan, who are again wildly different from a Wisconsonian. The UK is similar with the divide between the north and south of England, the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish.
I think some of it is natural, but it's being amplified with the advent of globalism.
I mean, it's not like he killed gay people and wrote incredibly racist stuff about black people.
But my point was the people that idolise him online and think they're going to carry out a violent revolution are inevitably the same people that tweet abuse at Adele for losing weight.
In 1995 it was a Usenet newsgroup, in 2005 it was a vBulletin forum, today it's a Twitter or Facebook community, tomorrow, it will be something else.
Facebook and Twitter get tons of hate because they make money hand over fist and founders/insiders become richer than god, (unlike Usenet or forum sites) but the internet has always been this way.
Reddit is designed around grouping people in echo chambers and users come to it for this reason. Facebook may still be more impactful due to the sheer volume of users, but I don't think Reddit's impact is negligeable.
This is true, technology certainly has progressed and lowered the barrier to entry for this and many other things, but my point is that the internet is nothing more than a social network.
Also, you might be overestimating how high the barrier to entry was. There were over 200,000 usenet groups at the peak.
Partly, I guess. The whole internet is a battlefield in the culture war now, though, and even completely unrelated subreddits start banning people who post in the "wrong" places even if they're otherwise following the rules. That and wikipedia is a complete mess now, instead of celebrating what we could build together academics are holding "edit-a-thons" where they tell students to put the lecturer's slant on everything. I have a feeling we might actually be in WW3 and it won't be nuclear, it'll be all about who can distribute their propaganda most effectively.
As an aside, even though HN has a distinct left bias I would say it's definitely one of the fairest forums I've posted on in the last couple of years.
The people do it to themselves. They believe what they want to believe, hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see. This is still largely a free country where there are multiple independent sources of "news", and individuals voluntarily expose themselves or not to whatever they choose. As far as I know, nobody is tied down in a chair and forced to watch certain TV shows or listen to certain radio shows for hours, days, weeks, months at a time, to the exclusion of all else. Maybe in airport terminals, but again, travel is also voluntary.
I find the "How did we arrive to this point" question interesting, because for most of recorded history, the masses of humanity have not been so different than they are today. If anything, "enlightenment" is a relatively rare occurrence.
> They believe what they want to believe, hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see.
> nobody is tied down in a chair and forced to watch certain TV shows or listen to certain radio shows for hours, days, weeks, months at a time, to the exclusion of all else.
Doesn’t this behaviour sound familiar? To me it sounds like addiction. What has changed is not our capacity to become addicted but the willingness of some to exploit this weakness for money and/or power. From the internet outrage generators to the social media outrage amplifiers. The addictiveness of outrage is now fully weaponised by those who have fully succumbed to the addictiveness of power and money. No handbrakes. No filters. No conscience. Lots of self denial, self delusion, self-justification.
The collision of these two addictions will destroy us if not unwound.
Agree that this is nothing new. Manipulation of people through misinformation has been the rule for a long time. What do you think religion is? Manipulation of people through misinformation to coerce people into behavior which benefits society.
It's honestly not too different than the pandemic we are living through. But instead of a biological virus, it's more of a thought virus. There's a lot of discussion in this thread about whether information should be more or less open, but if anything I think this past few years has shown how ideas such as antivaxx, antimask and election fraud can spread extremely effectively online and infiltrate millions of minds. Reminds me a bit of CGPGrey's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
Dawkins coined meme to mean just such a cultural piece of information that disseminates. Just as a gene wants to get to as many people as possible (ie natural, sexual selection) so too do ideas. In this case, the internet has vastly sped it up such that ideas can travel instantaneously.
It's not only that that ideas travel, but also how they evolve and adapt like a virus to be in the most potent and engaging version, not too dissimilar from natural selection. It also is true that they are much easier to spread than to cure (debunk).
Unfortunately, bad ideas also, like that meme should refer to a low-effort combination of some stock picture and some caption conveying puerile humor or a subcultural circle jerk.
That is a big difference right now I think. For most of the Trump presidency, Fox basically acted as his platform, and so I doubt much would have been different over that period if Twitter and Facebook didn't exist. With overturning an election being a bridge too far for them though, without the direct platform of Twitter, I don't see things getting to this point.
One could certainly argue that a system where leaders have a direct platform to address the people is more democratic than one that relies on media gatekeepers, but it does have its downsides.
Could those downvoting explain what part you disagree with? I'm making a few claims here, and I'm not sure which of them are disputable/objectionable:
-for most of his presidency, Fox News has echoed President Trump's viewpoint
-therefore for most of that period I'm not confident that his Twitter access has made a huge difference to outcomes (although a number of his comments have certainly been notable).
-recently though, Fox has not been entirely on board with Trump's claims that the election was rigged. They haven't denounced them as strongly as other media, but they haven't wholly endorsed them either.
-So in recent weeks, it appears to be that Trump's direct channel to his supporters via Twitter was instrumental in leading to the current situation.
It appears the majority disagree with me, but I'm not clear where.
Fox has both been for and against Trump throughout his presidency. They have, however, been pro-Republican for 2 decades, which is a separate issue.
Older Trump fans are mostly getting their info through FB now. Look at FB's top shared pages/posts. The younger ones are on spread out on FB, reddit, reddit clones.
There's also OAN, Epoch Times, RSBN, Parler, Newsmax, various YouTube vloggers like Millie Weaver, Anthony Brian Logan, Tim Pool, Mark Dice, etc. Quite a lot of conservative/alternative news and commentary out there. The Big Tech platforms include FB and YouTube are despised by pro-Trump folks, because of perceptions of suppression and censorship.
I still think mainstream news have a larger role in this, social media are followers. People share news stories as if they are true, with context often omitted, manipulated or outright fabricated. But people still trust their news.
CNN, NYT, Washington Post, HuffPost, Vox, Fox News turned into extremely biased sources of disinformation and blatant propaganda.
E.g. a fabricated story in The Atlantic magazine, citing anonymous sources, was repeated and amplified by all these major media hubs and then further by social media for weeks. It's like a giant wave after wave of misinformation and rumors presented as facts. The burden of evidence apparently no longer applies.
The bias is mostly on the left wing of political spectrum, but the right wing are not too far behind.
One thing is clear: the "Stop The Steal" crowd was clearly radicalized into something openly violent and seditious. Mainstream news outlets that actively encouraged this violence must be shut down.
I think it's right to call out the double-standard in reporting. There's a big dissonance in the eyes of folks who watched CNN stand over a burning building proclaiming that the BLM protests were in fact entirely peaceful. And in the eyes of folks watching FOX right now, saying the assault on the capital was largely peaceful. I'm not joking. Both of these things happened.
I think it's also important to call out what's different between the two instances. The BLM protests were in response to a real, meaningful threat to the safety of a group of individuals. American citizens. There were real life body counts that were being fought against, and an attempt was made to renegotiate the role of policing in modern society.
The capital assault was over something that didn't happen. The capital assault happened because the president has been fanning the flames of violence in America for four years. Seeding dissent. Destroying faith in governance and in the rule of law. Simply because of the fragility of his ego didn't allow him to accept defeat.
I'll come right out and say it, violence is never ok. It's also not fair to equate the two of these situations.
> The BLM protests were in response to a real, meaningful threat
actually, your two examples are very alike in the "things that did not happen" category. the murder of George floyd was negligent at best and malicious at worst, but racist cops killing blacks is simply not a large issue, and certainly not a "meaningful threat" to all black people.
San Harris published a seminal piece on the matter:
Without saying I agree or disagree, if I take the position that racism in policing doesn't exist, and that the police are treating everyone equally:
America has in prison today almost 0.7% of its entire population. Right now. It is the world's leading jailer on a per-capita basis. [1] Two thirds of private prisons (which lets step back for a second is horrifying as a concept) include minimum occupancy clauses. [2] This is an utter failure of the state in its duty of care to its citizens. To call this a conflict of interest doesn't even begin to do it justice.
The incarceration rate among African Americans is almost 7X that of white folks in America. Criminality and race do not go hand in hand, therefore there exists a real and meaningful problem that is disproportionately affecting a racial group. A social and/or economic problem.
African Americans have way more interaction with police and policing, and even if you believe there's no racial disparity in the way those interactions go down - that instead they're killed and harassed at the same rate as white folks on a per-encounter basis - the fact is they have way, way more encounters per capita. This is likely a function of the society that America has built and fostered.
The reaction and the frustration and the protest is still justified even if you believe that race didn't play a factor in the specific instances, and even if you believe there's no systemic issue with policing.
Now, there's also evidence that there is a difference in how they are treated by police, but I think my argument holds even if you reject that premise.
> if I take your position that racism in policing doesn't exist, and that the police are treating everyone equally:
Please don't do this. Its obvious OP didn't even remotely mean or say this.
They clearly said that there is some level of racism, not that it doesn't exist at all. Is it the greatest problem facing America? I'd argue its not even in the top 10.
> They clearly said that there is some level of racism, not that it doesn't exist at all. Is it the greatest problem facing America? I'd argue its not even in the top 10.
We can have multiple problems, and we can address them in parallel. We don't have to pretend one problem doesn't exist simply because we run into another.
Of course, why would anyone oppose it. But, we only have limited funds/time/political capital, etc. I think we should give top priority to healthcare/education/jobs/, and use the remaining funds to address other issues.
Thing is they're all tied in together. If you have a class of folks in low socioeconomic standing, leading to criminality, that's costing real dollars - in terms of the legal system, in terms of prisons, in terms of lost income, in terms of healthcare, and jobs. The argument I'm making is they're all the same thing.
If I did that, it was unintentional. When I noticed how my reply could have been interpreted that way I cleared it up. If I've done so elsewhere please do share, and I'll make the corrections. That's not my intention!
This large BLM crowds have the costume of destroy and set fire on anything on their way, just glasses were broken yesterday. If the protestors start destroy everything surely would justify a more strong action.
i have to agree. if you spend 4 years telling half the country they are the enemy for supporting trump then don't be surprised when half the country views you as the enemy.
You don't see how breaking into the Capitol Building, during a dual session, with the express intent of disrupting the ratification of election results, because the loser of said election egged them on, is a more serious situation?
of course not. they can have that meeting by zoom or teams or conference call. they didn't ruin anything, unlike the neighborhoods that may take years to rebuild.
they feel political unrest and they took it out on politicians. theyre probably wrong, but its better than burning down some unrelated guys store, no?
This is a nuanced issue. The intentions are indeed purer (if the comparison is restricted solely to someone breaching the Capitol building exclusively due to sincere belief the election was rigged [without displaying bigoted/fascist regalia/symbols] and someone burning down an arbitrary, unrelated private business after George Floyd's death), but two things:
- That's partly why this really highlights the cold immorality and/or the abject delusion of the fomenter of this activity more than it does for most of the mob. I don't necessarily think most of the protestors and rioters are immoral or trying to be malicious: I think they genuinely believe what their leader is telling them and believe they're doing a righteous thing to protect the Constitution and the country. So for a large subset of the people, I think Trump deserves more blame for this than they do, whatever the underlying reasoning behind his actions.
- It's difficult to accurately debate this without empirical classification of offenses (what people did and how many people did them), otherwise it's easy to start reducing a broad situation to one symbolized by its least or most admirable participants.
No matter what BLM did or didn't do - and saying they burned and looted cities for months is clear right-wing hyperbole - Trump supporters stormed the Capital, destroyed property, looted, committed violence and planted explosives in an attempt to disrupt the legitimate process of government and overturn the Presidential election.
They are exactly the breed of fascists that everyone thought they were. You can blame the left as easily as you breathe but there isn't enough whataboutism in the world to negate that.
What happened in Capitol hill pales in comparison to BLM. I watched them burn the streets of Chicago. They looted stores in the loop, twice. There are stores that are gone forever.
Nobody set the capitol on fire. The majority of protesters didn't even enter the building. They damaged some property in a public building. They didn't set a police station on fire.
There is absolutely no way you can compare what happened on the 6th to any BLM race riot. Was it wrong? absolutely. They should not have done it. But the left has burned and looted. Portland has been absolutely insane. A 14 year old black kid was killed in CHAZ by community police that shot up a white Jeep and then tried to get rid of all the evidences.
The Supreme Court dismissed the Texas lawsuit with three sentences. Three sentences!!! SCOTUS is the only venue for a state to challenge any other state.
People have lost faith in the system, not because of the orange man bad, but because the system if fucking broken. People are totally unwilling to even acknowledge the idea or concept that wide spread mail in ballot fraud happened, when it certainly did.
>People are totally unwilling to even acknowledge the idea or concept that wide spread mail in ballot fraud happened, when it certainly did.
This is the crux of the issue; one of the two movies playing on the same screen.
You and many other Trump voters genuinely believe this to be the case. The opposition believes there's no credible evidence not only for wide spread mail-in ballot fraud but not even for minor, scattered cases (besides the rare outliers here and there that are inevitable for every election).
This one particular issue carries the potential to catalyze a chain reaction that eventually leads to conflict or war, so I think it's extremely important that people at the very least take the discussion seriously and try to help bridge the gap between the two movies. If this doesn't happen, the screen might just get ripped asunder.
> The Supreme Court dismissed the Texas lawsuit with three sentences. Three sentences!!! SCOTUS is the only venue for a state to challenge any other state.
The same Supreme Court with six conservative justices? If Trump couldn’t convince the conservative justices anywhere (let alone at the highest level) that there was widespread fraud, maybe there wasn’t.
saying they burned and looted cities for months is clear right-wing hyperbole
Wait, is it? I'm not American and even I know that Portland has been the site of continuous nightly riots for months now. It stopped being reported a long time ago but it's still happening. https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo posts pictures and videos of it every single day all summer and winter. They smash up and burn buildings all the time, and that includes repeated attacks on federal courthouses.
Ngo claims the group are called antifa and the rioters all seem to be white, but they claim to be BLM and to be fighting against racism so I guess it's reasonable to call them BLM riots.
I mean, which kind of rioting is worse is absolutely a reasonable discussion to have, but writing off the last six months of nightly rioting in Portland as "right wing hyperbole" when there are endless pictures, videos, mugshots, etc ... well that just seems like the kind of bubble isolation that is being decried up thread.
Andy Ngo is completely and utterly full of shit. He spent much of 2019 working with Far Right groups like Patriot Prayer and the Proud Boys crafting narratives to demonize left-wing groups. He is on video discussing an upcoming brawl with Patriot Prayer. He lied about being hit by a cement milkshake. He has a long history of acting as a provocateur with no interest in objective report in any sense of the word. Helping to incite violence and feigning victim-hood is his MO. Any sentence starting with "Ngo claims" should be immediately disregarded.
The protests here in Portland have been limited to a few square blocks. The constant claims that the city is burning down are obvious hyperbole. And the completely disingenuous comparisons of these actions - however you view them - to terrorists storming the US Capitol to undermine an election is just astounding.
The thing is I don't really care about your ad hominem attacks on the messenger. Ngo posts video evidence and snapshots of arrest records. His Twitter feed is a more or less constant stream of primary evidence, often presented without comment. It speaks for itself. As for limited to a few square blocks, how is that relevant to what I said? The Capitol protests/riots are limited to a few square blocks as well.
Pointing out bias and lying are ad hominmem attacks now? Almost every one of the videos posted to Ngo's twitter are accompanied by his own commentary so I'm not sure how you could claim otherwise. And even if they weren't, I know of at least one specific incident where his sharing of a carefully edited video with missing information created a completely false narrative. His "reporting" has been deeply intertwined with the violence in this city, directly collaborating with violent far right groups, helping to doxx political activists and leading to multiple instances of death threats.
I understand that you're not in Oregon or even the US - and even though Ngo clearly speaks to your politics, he's not an accurate source of information. There's an abundance of information showing that to be the case.
Baloney. First, two wrongs don’t make a right. Anyone in support of this seditious and violent behavior should be ashamed.
Second, you have it backwards. Trump IS an authoritian - if today isn’t proof of that to you then I don’t know what to say to you.
Which sadly seems to exactly be the problem.
But I’ll reiterate the facts:
- Zero election fraud.
- President Trump lying and saying fraud existing, that the election is not in fact legitimate, and encouraging a violent mob to storm the capital.
Yes you are absolutely right! Trump bombed innocent kids in Syria after receiving the "Nobel Peace Prize". Trump dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016. Trump launched multiple Wars, invaded foreign countries and destroyed millions of lives and livelihood. Isn't it? Trump did all of the things an Authoritarian would do. Hang him for his crimes!
> - if today isn’t proof of that to you then I don’t know what to say to you.
I haven't come across an imperialist who did not end up becoming authoritarian or wasn't already an authoritarian. History is witness to what colonialism/imperialism can do to subjects it ends up gaining control over.
The United States was some sort of imperialist throughout much of its history (even at the time when that imperialism was confined to the American continent) and yet solidly democratic throughout that period.
By contrast, there are countless instances of autocrats that don't invade other countries, e.g. Lukashenka.
> The United States was some sort of imperialist throughout much of its history (even at the time when that imperialism was confined to the American continent) and yet solidly democratic throughout that period.
True. But doesn't stop imperialists from being autocratic in the areas they colonize because no rule of law exists once a regime is toppled and a vacuum created in those regions. It is literally free for all. For a period of time, that occupied area belongs to the imperialist power (unless the power is magnanimous enough to let go of the occupied area and allow the people to determine their fate). But during that period, would the laws of the imperialist power extend to occupied territories? I don't think so. I haven't heard of any such instance in history.
> By contrast, there are countless instances of autocrats that don't invade other countries, e.g. Lukashenka.
True as well. But it comes down to not having WMD and threatening the World (case in point: North Korea or even China). So these are autocrats but with their sphere of influence only restricted to their own territory because of lack of military capabilities. Do you seriously think that Lukashenko won't flex his muscle over other neighbouring European countries if he had military capabilities the likes of which US has?
Right, but the question wasn't whether imperialism implies authoritarianism but whether authoritarianism implies imperialism.
Most/all imperialists are authoritarian but many authoritarians aren't imperialists. It's true that Trump doesn't appear to be as imperialistic or hawkish as many previous presidents, but that doesn't imply one way or another anything about potential authoritarianism.
You made an argument that accusations of Trump being an authoritarian are unfounded, but as evidence you cited examples of him not being an imperialist, rather than examples of him not being an authoritarian. Your examples don't preclude the possibility of him potentially being a non-imperialistic authoritarian.
> rather than examples of him not being an authoritarian
Well can you give me a way to find examples of him "not being" an authoritarian? That very question shows how weak your argument is. That you have to clutch at straws to prove he is an autocrat.
Now let me ask you this: Is Putin an autocrat? You can give countless examples of why he is. Is Xi an autocrat? You can give countless examples of why he is. Is Kim Jong-un an autocrat? You can give countless examples of why he is. From targeted assassinations of opposition leaders to detention/containment/concentration/re-education camps you have every single reason to label them autocratic. Can you give examples of Trump being an autocrat? The literal definition of "autocrat" is "someone who has absolute power". Trump doesn't have absolute power. So how does it make him an autocrat?
There are literally many autocrats in this World you can compare against. Trump is definitely a loud mouth. No doubt about it. And he is crass in the way he speaks. He doesn't have a likeable personality. He is a narcissist.
His entire tenure was literally crying about how media treats him, how many in his own party don't support him (RINOs) and how investigations against him vis-a-vis Russian collusion was based on a hoax. Can you name one autocrat who cried about how powerless he is? Have you seen Putin talk this way? Xi talk this way? What about Hitler? Name one autocrat who comes to your mind who has exhibited this behaviour. You can't. This in no way sounds like an autocrat. An autocrat is never this weak and defeatist.
The first thing an autocrat would do is muscle the media. Media thrived under the Trump regime. Constantly berating and attacking him. If this had happened in China or Russia that media house would be non-existent the very next second with all journalists mysteriously missing. If Jack Ma isn't safe you think journalists would be? No ways. This is autocracy for you.
Heck, Trump ran his entire 2016 campaign on the slogan of "Lock her up". Did he do it? On the contrary, the entire scandal was hushed up and the investigative agencies instead focused on Trump's supposed collusion with Russia and Ukraine. I can bet my right limb no investigative agency will investigate Biden on his ties with Ukraine. Why? Because things are back to how it always was. Trump was just an aberration. History will be kinder to him because right now emotions are high and no one wants to see things without filters.
> Shame on you; you should be ashamed of yourself.
Shame on me? I am no American. I don't need to be ashamed of the mess that USA has become. By the look of it you voted for Obama. So you should be ashamed of a President who had the gall to receive a Nobel Peace Prize and then went on to bomb foreign nations with impunity causing millions to die and be displaced. My country has never invaded other nations and will never do that. I don't need to feel any shame. You need to. On the contrary we fought back tyranny and created a new country called Bangladesh. Could have easily occupied that captured area after overthrowing a tyrannical, oppressive regime and re-integrated it back into our country. We did not do that. That is what separates us from the imperialist developed World.
> I see what you’re doing - you point out someone else’s flaws but avoid the matter at hand and under discussion.
Well it is quite easy to point fingers at someone while forgetting that three fingers are pointing back at you. If you can criticize Trump I can criticize Obama. I don't need to follow your script of how to respond. I can respond in my own way. Thankfully, the place I come from isn't authoritarian where I have to respond in a certain way else I am shamed/cancelled/rejected/boycotted or worse killed.
I am perfectly fine with media holding Trump accountable. And it should. What I am not okay with is that it is directed only at Trump and everyone else is given a free pass. This I say as an observer of US politics. Media must do its job and be objective. What you see today at the US Capitol is anger spilling out because the Right wasn't even heard and dismissed as something dangerous. When you stifle expression it explodes in unexpected ways. Because people see how ridiculous it is that Trump was made to prove he isn't a supporter of KKK some 35 times while Biden passed racist laws that incarcerated thousands of Black Americans and was given a free pass. Vice President Kamala Harris called Biden a racist during the primaries. Today she has happily taken up the job of being the Vice President under him. If she had an ounce of integrity in her she would have refused to work under a person she herself called a racist. In all this where was the media? No where to be seen. It just wants to milk Trump till the bitter end. Even if it leads to division, violence and destruction. The easiest way to pacify the Right is to hold the Left leaders accountable for their misdeeds too. Balance it. Then you won't have any discontent among any base (be it the left or the right). But media thrives on sensationalism.
Think about it. Obama bombed a foreign nation 26000 times. 26000 times! Did any mainstream media (I am not just talking about CNN here. It includes Fox as well) rake this issue up during his tenure and make a big deal out of it. It did not. Why not? Because everyone got along. The political class, media and diplomats. Everyone were in sync. Trump was an aberration. He did not play by that rulebook. He was an outsider. What Trump has done may not be understood today but history will be kind to him. Once the dust settles and people introspect, they'll realise how fucked up the system had gotten to that it took just 1 orange haired man to shake it all up. And please don't think for once that I am singling out USA. My country has flaws too. Probably a lot more than USA. Just because we don't drone other countries doesn't mean we are perfect. But you can't get to perfection by drowning out the voice of the people. Even if it means 75 million of them who voted for Trump. Trump was just a figurehead for the grievances that those 75 million hold. Those who voted did not vote because they believe in White Supremacy or that they are against immigration or they are fascists. Nor are people in the left communists, socialists and crazy lunatics. This sort of reductionist thinking is what is causing division and spite. In fact, if you look at the voter demographic in this election, Trump lost because he lost the vote of white voters and instead gained in minority communities: Blacks, Latinos and Asians (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/14/joe-bi...). Why? Why would a racist, white supremacist lose the white vote and gain the minority vote?
Some of what you are saying I agree with and believe is true. Other parts of what you are saying are, I believe, overly reductive and not accurate. I think your post articulates some important points and also overlooks some. But they're also kinda mixed together and there's a lot there, so, tbh, I can't take the time to fully parse out your comment and respond with the kind of clarity one ideally would wish to in an intellectual discussion, the kind you know that would stand up to analysis and reasoned argument. So, do I agree with you? Ehh, yes and no?
Just kind of imagine me saying it with a Larry David voice, if you've ever watched the show 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' (speaking of American cultural imperialism/colonization lol).
> Second, you have it backwards. Trump IS an authoritian - if today isn’t proof of that to you then I don’t know what to say to you.
His last and final tweet was literally to tell everyone to go home and not cause violence. He literally said he wanted peace. Either you haven't listened to it or your hatred is so strong nothing will quench that fire.
Trump could have told them to occupy the building and they would have. He is the first president in my lifetime to not start a new war. He let cities burn and didn't send in any people unless states asked for it.
In what fucked up world do you think Trump is authoritarian?
Um he incited the mob in the first place and his message also praised the mob; he’s a liar and manipulator and this isn’t a time to pretend that his second grade wordplay-cleverness deniability double language actually fools anyone.
He’s the fucking President of the country. He has responsibilities to defend the Constitution and the government and the country. He clearly failed those responsibilities today.
Bring the challenge to court. Say in court, under oath, the allegations that you claim in public. Accept the outcome of those cases. This has happened several times in recent presidential elections without triggering insurgency.
Trump's lawyers played a PR game. They made ostentatious allegations in public, but almost never presented the courts with a viable case -- and notably, didn't claim those allegations in court. The court is obliged to throw out cases without merit, and did so. And that makes it really easy to run out and claim that the court is tossing out your cases without them going to trial.
Only like anything that isn't actually inciting a mob?
Seriously, I can't believe you had good intent and were engaging in good faith with that question because it's so obviously baloney.
You need to think hard about your values, or, educate yourself more about history.
For example:
- Winston Churchill's five-volume history of WWII. Read the first volume of that and you'll understand what is or isn't OK in government, even in exceptional times. You'll also understand what government actually is, and what politics actually is. You'll see what a leader making a difficult and controversial decision, and then taking responsibility for it, actually looks like - in both success and failure.
- Leadership: In Turbulent Times, by Doris Kearns Goodwin. A classic which looks at Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ at critical moments in their Presidencies and their past experiences which prepared them for success as leaders during a crisis.
If you had read those books, or works of a similar quality, you would know better.
As it stands it just sounds like you don't really understand what responsibility, leadership, accountability, politics, and government actually are.
Or, that you're not interested in those things actually functioning in a just and democratic fashion.
I honestly don't know which it is.
Not to stereotype but I feel like SO many people on HN don't realize just how uneducated they are about history, government, and politics.
This IS new in our modern times. Ever since The Second World War this has never occured.
The US yo me now seems to have become close to the comedy movie Idiocracy.
You know in the 80s and 90s everyone looked up to the US so much. It was where everyone dreamt of going. I dont know anyone who clings on to that idea now.
Yes, horrible things have, at times, been done in the name of religion. But to claim that religion, generally speaking, is all about manipulation through misinformation is wrong.
I'm not even stating horrible things were done. Religion is just a management tool to align people's actions in a way that benefits the society they live in, and help it succeed in competition with other societies.
A lot of the effects of religion have been mostly positive, but in its core it's based on misinformation.
Religion is not a tool. It was not designed by anyone. It's an emergent phenomenon, a product of culture.
Sure, some people (especially historically) have treated it like a tool, but that is not religion's fault (religion can't be at fault because it lacks agency). Those people would have seized upon whatever cultural phenomenon that was available to their own political purposes.
> Religion is not a tool. It was not designed by anyone. It's an emergent phenomenon, a product of culture.
It absolutely was designed. Thoughtfully and explicitly.
You might find it interesting to learn about how the new testament was assembled. Many books did not make it into the final version of the new testament, left on the cutting room floor of history. The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew for instance has a teenage Jesus fighting dragons. Check out the New Testament Apocrypha. [1]
This is such an uninformed view; I am surprised to see it advanced on this forum.
Any scholar of the NT knows that the apochrypha date very late and the cannon is the legitimately oldest extant texts. There is no evidence that earlier texts were excluded. You do know (you probably don't) that the majority of the Pauline epistles are considered to be authentic, by secular atheist scholars, and date to to the middle of the first century right?
Outside of the pauline works, Hebrews is dated to no later than about 45 AD by secular, non believing scholars.
You're advacing a rather tired late 19th century view that just doesn't wash in the light of modern scholarship but was the darling of many 1800s and early 1900s lutherans.
That's not actually the point I'm making. I'm not speaking to the veracity or authenticity of the selected texts. I've no basis to make that judgement. Thanks for sharing that, however, I find this stuff super interesting will dig into that more!
The point I'm making is that the new testament was curated and texts were picked and chosen to advance the interests of those picking and choosing.
The claim in question is that religion was designed for the sake of mass manipulation. Because some religions have been shaped and curated deliberately does not mean that religion didn't originally emerge organically as a consequence of shared culture.
Is the New Testament cannon the best example? Why not the Old Testament?
Ancient Jews saw the scriptures as possessing different levels of “cannonicity” - the Books of Moses were “very cannon” while books like Maccabees were “new fangled.”
Christians adopted that view as well. The fights over the Old Testament are still ongoing with different religions organically accepting or rejecting other books every now and then.
The logic behind these still ongoing arguments has much to do with traditions, and little with the actual content.
If we were to reevaluate the Old Testament with fresh eyes, I don’t think anyone would include Ecclesiastes or Job. Too depressing and bizarre.
Not even clear what’s going on or when it’s taking place.
But ultimately there’s a certain logic to these debates - and “we’re designing a religion” isn’t part of it.
From the linked page, it looks like this occurred hundreds of years after Christianity started, and after it was already quite well-established, so it doesn't seem accurate to say that the Christian religion was designed, even if the new testament was.
Without venturing further back, which we can, consider that for most people the New Testament is the religion. The Old Testament is a collection of neo-pagan stories, fables and rules for fair play in olden times.
Every society needs rules, ways to enforce these rules, ways to teach these rules, and ways to get people to align to common objectives.
Throughout history societies have used religion as a way to do this. Every society usually had one official religion that was used in this way: ancient egyptians, ancient greece, roman empire (first a religion copied from greece, later replaced by christianity, where the center of christianity was actually moved to rome), european kingsdoms with different versions of their official christian religions, and other countries throughout the world.
It's a pretty simple mechanism: follow our rules, god sees everything, if you don't follow the rules you will be punished, i.e., go to hell, if you follow the rules you will be rewarded, i.e., go to heaven.
We do the same thing with children in the hope that they'll listen to their parents: if you are a good boy/girl you get presents from sinterklaas (santaclause), if you are bad you will be be punished. Dutch santaclaus will take the bad children to spain, which is our version of hell ;-)
Funny thing is that children around the age of 8 will be smart enough to understand that they've been lied to and that santaclaus doesn't exist, whereas with religion some adults never get to this point of enlightenment.
Well in modern times today, eye witness testimony still carries much weight, and still being used to determine truth in a court of law. So therefore, the eye witness testimony of hundreds of commoners, including the inner circle of disciples and apostles who saw Jesus Christ in flesh and blood and attest to his miracles in person, plus the third party accounts by roman and jewish independent observers and historians alike.
I have never heard of any true historical proof of the existence of Jesus whatsoever. No eyewitness accounts, no Roman accounts, no Jewish accounts, etc.
And to top it off, his story ends with him rising from the dead!8-))
The evidence which I described as ‘anecdotal’ starts a mere twenty or thirty years after Jesus’s death, and comes from sources who didn’t have any particular interest in promoting the Christian agenda. It seems that I may be unlikely to convince you, but if you’ve already got a strong opinion on this it might help to come at it from the other direction and start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory#No_independ... first.
Personally, I don’t really think it matters much either way (the events of a few decades being much less influential than the following two millennia of activities by people who did believe he existed), so I default to taking the word of people who’ve actually studied the matter in depth; but as he was one of several Roman-era Messiah claimants wandering around (we know of at least two others, and there were probably more whose names never made it into the histories we have) it seems reasonable that the group which happened to catch on would have also originally coalesced around an actual person.
You can be easily disabused of this ignorant view by reading the wikipedia page for the historicity of jesus. Jesus mysticism is a fringe, crackpot view in historical scholarship. People adopt it because it suits their priors not because it has the weight of literally any scholarship or investigation behind it. It is , simply put, a ridiculous proposal in the light of what is known about the NT.
My understanding (from reading a book called "who wrote the Bible") is scholars generally agree Jesus existed, but out of the 5 main objective criteria for "did a character exist", he only satisfies 3 of the 5. IIRC, the fact that he plays so prominently in modern life acts as an effect size: in the 3 categories he can be confirmed, he is off the charts.
So it is generally accepted he existed, even if the criteria used to judge other historical characters is loosened for JC.
Edit - but please try to not say things like "ignorant" or "disabused" unless you meant to attack OP. Those are pretty loaded words for a collegial discussion.
Existence of historical Jesus has been well established. First century Jewish historian Josephus and Roman historian Tacitus wrote about him... For eyewitness, you can find first person account in the New Testaments.
Two mentions. One is almost certainly fabricated, or at least heavily rewritten by later Christians.
> For eyewitness, you can find first person account in the New Testaments.
The Gospels aren't first person accounts. The closest you get to first person accounts of Jesus in the NT are brief mentions of Paul's conversion experiences in his epistles. The Gospels probably draw on first person accounts to some extent, but they themselves aren't first person accounts.
There's a very strong case to be made for the historicity of Jesus, but you make a misleading one by leaving out some very important context regarding Josephus and mischaracterizing the accounts of Jesus in the NT.
The criteria with which you dismiss the historical Jesus is also applicable to any other historical figure of antiquity. By your measure, no one without a photograph, video, or audio recording can be counted as anything other than a myth. The historical Jesus is very real (as is His Divinity, but that is beyond the scope of this response).
So you agree then that documented eye witness reports of non-Christian gods prove that those gods also exist? That the Christian god is just one of many?
The default state of a human is an agnostic. If you are born and nobody tells you the Good Word, you live your entire life without religion. If someone comes to you one day and tells you a man lives in the clouds with a deep-seated interest in your sex life, the onus is then on you to convince the agnostic. The burden of proof is on you.
If I told you the story of our lord and savior Sauron, could you prove to me it's not true? Could you prove to me any of the Lord of the Rings didn't happen?
>The default state of a human is an agnostic. If you are born and nobody tells you the Good Word, you live your entire life without religion.
There are some interesting arguments that we evolved to become hard-wired for religion. Fear during early evolution was probably the driver for this, all the earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, death by germs etc. We invented religion as a means to explain stuff - the solar cycle, disease, etc, etc. Turns out those explanations were wrong, but our biology is still the same ..
I'm with you there, I believe humans did evolve a capacity for religiosity. I'm pretty sure that a child that grows up on an island however isn't going to spontaneously regenerate the new testament haha.
No but they will believe some form of religion. Christianity and others survived because they were just able to compete against other religions in that area and time period.
Look at the context of this discussion. The claim was made that all religion is based on misinformation.
I argued that that claim is wrong.
Someone responded saying, "find one true account that religion is based on". I responded asking whether they could find an account that is proven false.
The context here is important--I'm not arguing my belief in religion, or that you must believe in religion. I'm arguing that not all religion is based on misinformation. I brought up my question to point out that his question is irrelevant, and he can't prove anything to be false, therefore he can't prove that it's all misinformation.
If I see a bird fly over my head, then claim to you, "a bird flew over my head", I can't prove it. Neither can you disprove it. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, or that my claim isn't real, or that my claim is misinformation.
~2000 years ago people witnessed Christ die and some claim they saw Him come back to life. They wrote about it. Those letters still exist today. I agree that this information alone is not enough to justify someone changing their life to believe the letters--merely existing doesn't "prove" that what's in them is true. But pretend for a second it really did happen. What evidence/proof do you think you'd find that could prove it?
This is honestly getting watered down a lot though, with people jumping in without reading everything. I don't blame them--I do the same on HN.
If someone wishes to discuss why I personally believe, and what I believe in, that's a different thing altogether that I'm happy to discuss but not here on HN.
I'd argue that the problem with this analogy is that a bird flying overhead is something we know is possible and indeed common. According to all scientific knowledge and evidence, resurrection is not possible. So absent significant evidence, it's not logical to believe that this happened. We also know that religion has historically provided numerous benefits to societies, allowing for trust, cooperation, and trade in societies that predate effective government. So it is logical to assume that such belief systems would develop, and that societies that developed them would prevail over those that didn't, even in the absence of supernatural evidence.
Given that religion contradicts what we know about the physical world, and that its existence is explained without reliance on the supernatural, it's not logical to believe its supernatural claims.
So if something cannot be observed by you, within your 15-100 years of life (assuming you fit within that range), that simply means it's impossible for it to have occurred? And that any claims otherwise are misinformation?
No one claims that someone is resurrected every day. The claims of Christianity are that it occurred once, and that it was a miracle.
The thought that it's impossible for something to have occurred unless it's commonly overserved isn't sound. There is no such requirement. There are plenty of rare events that occur, with and without scientific explanation.
Update: Perhaps here's what we're missing. There is information, misinformation, and then there's claims that cannot be proven or disproved. I do not believe that all things are false until proven true. I believe that Christianity, and many other religions, can be neither proven or disproven using modern science. It is neither misinformation or information. It is a belief.
> I do not believe that all things are false until proven true. I believe that Christianity, and many other religions, can be neither proven or disproven using modern science. It is neither misinformation or information. It is a belief.
Where we disagree is that you think that a 2000 year old text that's been translated 7 or 8 times and by what we would consider today to be idiots (human IQ has increased dramatically over time, in 1910 alone the IQ midpoint would be today's 70, which is a full standard deviation lower) - should be given the benefit of the doubt and be granted a reverse burden of proof. Idiots mind you who would have you burned at the stake for the laptop you're replying on.
The scriptures should be approached analytically with modern techniques. Does anything in there line up with observable reality? No. Is there a plausible explanation? No. Ergo, we should assume its false unless we discover some evidence that it might be true.
The challenge with doing that is religions rely on indoctrinating the youth before they're capable of making rational evaluations and play to our evolutionary weaknesses (the need for an explanation).
> There are plenty of rare events that occur, with and without scientific explanation.
Indeed but I'm not going to recommend telling a 4 year old I've just dunked under water about them based on a book written by an idiot 2000 years ago.
> It is neither misinformation or information. It is a belief.
It's a myth. Myths are fine, but shouldn't be presented as fact. And they certainly shouldn't be true until proven false.
By this token, until you prove otherwise, the whole world was started on a giant turtle. [1]
I think calling ancient people idiots is ingenuine. Just because you know trigonometry and someone 2000 years ago didn't know trigonometry doesn't mean that person is an idiot...
I agree there are many strangeties that are in the Bible that don't seem to be plausible, and we should not accept them as fact, due to the nature of translating ancient texts and the corrupting influences of government and religions. You are right that certain stories shouldn't just be believed or accepted without evidence. But you are wrong to say that there is nothing in the scriptures that lines up with observable reality.
The Bible contains many many stories about Human behavior and emotions. Mob violence, rape, drunkeness, greed, corruption, and contain many good lessons on understanding these behaviors in order to overcome them. These are behaviors we observe in our everyday lives.
There are great teachings in the Bible if that is what you are looking for. If you look in the Bible to try and find every falsehood or inconsistency you will never actual find anything of value to your life.
"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter." - Proverbs 25:2
> I think calling ancient people idiots is ingenuine. Just because you know trigonometry and someone 2000 years ago didn't know trigonometry doesn't mean that person is an idiot...
Nothing to do with trig, it's based on IQ assessments. [1] Human intelligence has increased dramatically as a function of nutrition, as a function of living in cities, as a function of education and so on. It's even happening to raccoons who live in cities. [2]
It's not their fault, but compared to modern humans, they were big dummies.
> There are great teachings in the Bible if that is what you are looking for. If you look in the Bible to try and find every falsehood or inconsistency you will never actual find anything of value to your life.
Yeah, it's a modern Aesop's Fables. It's a bunch of stories, some made up, some collected from experience, which are used to provide guidance to living your life.
You are making the case that if I cannot disprove any religious text, then by default, it's information and not misinformation even though it flies in the face of observable reality. That isn't really how we look at things.
Everything is misinformation until proven otherwise.
The bigger and grander the claim, the higher the burden of proof. With a bird, the claim ain't exactly grand, and I'm willing to take you at your word. On the other hand if you told me a bird flew over your head, turned into a plane and wrote "I'm Your Lord and Savior" in skywriting, well, I'm gonna need more than just your word on it.
It doesn't really matter if those events long time ago actually happened, and were interpreted correctly at the time, with the knowledge people had at the time.
What matters is do you today believe heaven and hell are real, and will you go to either one when you die? Will you be judged by some know-it-all entity, and what rules does (s)he judge you by? Do you need to follow the roman, greek, egyptian, viking, moslim, christian, catholic, protestant, ..., rules to go to heaven? And if you follow the christian rules, and god turns out to be allah, will you go to hell?
The onus is on the person making the initial claim; you can't make an assertion without evidence and then expect people who disagree to prove the negative. Could say the same thing about claims of rigged elections.
Having faith can be applied generally. To me, this is the philosophy of Christ that taught me the most. Do you have faith in humanity? Do you have hope that people will choose goodness over wickedness? I do. History has taught me that humans move forward. I have faith in humanity that progress will continue. I believe that righteousness and justice can be the fuel to drive us forward. If I didn't have any faith what would I have? If everyone was a cynic, where would we be? Certainly much worse off than we see ourselves today.
My point is not that having faith is wrong or bad, rather, that to believe in the kinds of myths many religions espouse requires faith.
It is impossible to believe in the teachings of the Bible without having faith. I'm sure you bring an equal amount of faith when reading other stories. You don't? Why not?
That's exactly right. You can see how well the above compliments misinformation right?
Go ahead and read any religious text (I've read many!). Nearly every culture has one or many myths. Do you believe them to be fact? Or do you only believe your religious text to be true? And if so, why?
I don't mean to take a stance against religion in general. I agree with the above commenter that the impact of religion in a general sense does seem to be positive! A shared mythos can be a very powerful way of building community. This can have very real positive affects on a population, and, depending on that mythos, on an individual. But to suggest that religion doesn't require "faith" (i.e. believing in something despite no evidence) is... well... naïve.
Is something false merely because it can't be proven?
I've gone through other forks on this thread. Here's my conclusion. No religion that I'm aware of can be proven or disproved based on scientific fact or observation. Yet that does not mean they are all false or true. One could very well be true. Or they could be false. But simply because we can't prove it doesn't mean it must be false. You cannot claim "misinformation" without proving its false. I cannot (and am not) claiming it "information" without proven it true. Its neither.
There is a different question to ask, which is how and why people choose to believe in religion provided that they cannot be proven. I have my reasons, my personal evidences, that have led me to believe my religion is true. I also believe that you can learn for yourself whether or not my religion is true. If you wish to learn more about my experience and what has led me to believe, I'll share it in a venue that encourages respect and understanding. Unfortunately online forums rarely provide that.
I am honestly not trying to argue whether one specific myth is true or not. You are missing my point.
There are many myths from many cultures that seek describe where we came from or how we ought to live. For example, nearly every culture has some story about the creation of man/the earth. They all cannot possibly be true. I'm sure we can agree that man/the earth wasn't created as many times as there are stories about it.
So you are making claims about truth! How can you square the above with your belief in your own religion using the thought paradigm you outlined above? By claiming that your creation story is true (or as you may put it, "not proven false") you are also making a claim that all others are not true. A claim you have just argued cannot be made... It's all a fallacy.
The most interesting question worth answering is: Why do you believe the myths that you do?
Statistically speaking, the answer is because it is the one your parents believed. It's hard to explain away the eerie correlation between a person's religion and where they were born. Why is it that a child born in the Middle-East is so likely to follow Islam, a child in the West Christianity, in India Hindu, etc. etc.? It's almost as if these religions are a product of the people, not some greater truth.
And for what it's worth, I see no meaningful difference between something that is false and something that cannot be proven to be true:
"There are 2,145,124,152 birds in flight above the earth right now." - do you believe me?
"Jesus Christ just came down and told me personally that Hindu is the one true religion" - do you believe me?
"I just saw a red 2018 Toyota 4Runner drive past my house" - do you believe me?
"One of the above claims it true" - do you believe me?
What role does "faith" play when appraising the above questions? Are you applying "faith" in the same way to the above as you do to your religion? Probably not.
I agree, I cannot see how all the stories could be true. I believe one to be true, and the rest to be false. Does that mean I have scientific proof that one is true? No, and I have never claimed to. Does that mean I'm asking you to believe what I believe, simply because I believe it? No, I'd never do that. But this is beyond the point.
My arguments on this thread have been about the claim that all religion is based on "misinformation". I feel a bit like a broken record here, but in order for something to be misinformation it must be proven false. Claims can either be proven true, proven false, or simply not proven true or false. There are 3 states--not 2.
Religions fall into the last category, where the claims have not been proven or disproved. It's not misinformation until it's proven false. It's also not information until it's proven true. Which gets back to the key differences between faith and scientific fact. Faith is belief in something not (yet) proven true or false. Belief in science is based on something science has proven true or false. You're trying to take the way you approach science, likely because it's what you've been surrounded by in your recent life, and force it upon religious views. It doesn't work, because the basis for faith in a religion implies that the thing isn't proven using science.
> Statistically speaking, the answer is because it is the one your parents believed. It's hard to explain away the eerie correlation between a person's religion and where they were born. Why is it that a child born in the Middle-East is so likely to follow Islam, a child in the West Christianity, in India Hindu, etc. etc.? It's almost as if these religions are a product of the people, not some greater truth.
What environment have you been raised in? Western world, analytically educated? Atheism is a religion. It's the belief that there is no higher power--but it's still a belief... based on faith (not science). Science has neither proven or disproved the existence of God. Agnostic is also a religion based on faith. Whatever your actual beliefs or lack of beliefs are, it's not based on scientific fact.
The word "myth" implies the account is proven false (through science). It's not accurate to use, unless you're able to prove the religious accounts false.
I'm not asking you to believe me. I'm not asking you to believe in my religion. I'm simply stating that claiming all religions are based on misinformation cannot be done until they're all proven false.
You've made great leaps about why I believe without understanding me, my faith, or the process I went through (and continue going through) to obtain and keep my faith. You can make as many assumptions as you want, but they haven't been accurate and likely won't be if you continue to do so.
> What role does "faith" play when appraising the above questions? Are you applying "faith" in the same way to the above as you do to your religion? Probably not.
I do not have faith in any of the claims you've made, no matter how reasonable. I'm not arguing that any one of them is true or false.
> The most interesting question worth answering is: Why do you believe the myths that you do?
I agree, this is the more interesting question. But it's not something I wish to discuss on a public forum. It's deeply personal. If you are genuinely interested, I'd happily share it in a different venue.
You are arguing that religious myths[0] cannot be claimed to be true or false while simultaneously claiming to believe your religious myths to be true and all others false. I was hoping to lead you here without saying it explicitly, but that is what I was getting at when I asked what it meant to "have faith". It means to hold a belief that cannot be rationalized.
With the above inconsistency in mind we can explore what it means to "prove something false":
The top answer here summarize the current state of our understanding. The key terms on which to focus are "inconsistent" and "contradiction". Can you see how believing in something that cannot be rationalized is inconsistent or a contradiction? It is the belief in a religion itself that is the contradiction. It doesn't matter whether any specific event can be proved true or false (again that is not my point). My point is that "having faith" is to recognize this contradiction and choose to believe anyway. By simply "having faith" you are, yourself, proving it false.
That isn't to say having faith is a bad thing! I will again commend organized religion as a valuable tool to both the individual and society. People are not rational. Feelings are not rational. I genuinely believe that the good that comes from religion outweighs the bad. That doesn't mean I can't recognize it for what it is...
And I am not an atheist! I guess it depends what you mean be "God" though... I don't believe in any region as an ideology, but I do believe in religion as an institution (I do go to church on occasion): Was there a person name Jesus? Probably. Did he inspire good things? Mostly likely. Are the lessons we learn from his story valuable? Absolutely! Did he turn water into wine? No. Did he rise from the dead? Of course not.
In this way I believe in religion, but I don't "have faith".
[0] The word "myth" does not always denote something that is false.
> You are arguing that religious myths[0] cannot be claimed to be true or false
I'd correct this to say "You are arguing that religious myths[0] cannot be claimed to be true or false [using science]"
> It means to hold a belief that cannot be rationalized.
I think you're ignoring the possibility for people to believe things for reasons other than science. If I have a spiritual experience that leads me to believe something is true, I have reason to believe, yet I cannot prove it to others. Does that make it rational? I think it could be argued that it is, especially for the person who had the experience.
I'm okay with "myth" being used then.
Thank you for the respect you've demonstrated. I value discussions like this.
Humanity has yet to find a greater way to seek objective truth than the scientific method.
This discussion started as an exploration of the claim that [all] religion is based on misinformation. And I can see, upon reading that word, how someone could interpret "misinformation" to connote a negativity towards religion. I personally do not see it that way, rather, as an accurate and objective description of the phenomenon. This is because believing in religion requires faith, and to "have faith" means [look at discussion above].
In other words religion is a paradigm based on information that cannot be proved true (not just that it hasn't been proved true). I would classify the above as misinformation -- information that cannot be believed (i.e. rationalized). Choosing to believe anyway is each individual's prerogative, but I don't think it changes how we should talk about it.
I don't mean this as a critique to living a life of faith. Though I personally cannot "have faith" (I cannot believe a person walked on water), it doesn't mean I don't believe in God or the values that many religions profess. It just means that "God" means something different to me. It probably means something different to everyone. As you say, "It's personal".
I’d say faith can be belief in anything you haven’t seen yourself, including thing done through scientific methods. I have to have faith in scientist that they know what they are doing and correctly reported their results and in the committees that review them.
I think it may be a natural human condition to be a part of a religion. But these days, politics has become the religion, instead of in the past, the religion became the politics....
> to claim that religion, generally speaking, is all about manipulation through misinformation is wrong
This claim only holds water because -- in theory -- there is no precise definition of what "religion" is. In practice, it's a set of rules and rituals to follow (literal manipulation) on penalty of an unprovable/unfalsifiable entity or system punishing you (misinformation).
So, okay, "generally speaking" it's not about that. Now show me that the majority of religions don't boil down to manipulation and misinformation.
Truth is required to act freely. Freedom requires knowledge, and in order to act freely in the world, you need to know what the world is and know what you’re doing. You only know what you’re doing if you have access to the truth. So freedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth.
Part of what fascist politics does is get people to disassociate from reality, there is no truth, there is only opinions. You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader and his opinion.
Part of interview on Fascism with Jason Stanley Professor of Philosophy at Yale University.
If you break down religion to be an organized belief system or doctrine, religion can exist without being called a religion.
Religion is no more misinformation than a particular Philosophy is misinformation; a perspective on reality. Even the meta-philosophical act (philosophy of philosophy) of having an ontology of philosophy or any form of abstraction/reification, is an organized form of how one views the world.
Both. Organized religion has always been an instrument of control and fostered inequality, but it also glued societies together and provided an incentive structure that promoted selfless behavior.
School. Nobody is tied down to a chair but children are challenged to think critically on a daily basis.
A good education should produce a balanced and well rounded adult. I teach CS ages 14 to 18 and all teachers have pastoral care responsibilities. I teach much more than just the curriculum. Some lessons — tutorials — are dedicated to general education.
A highlight from last term was tackling the question “is being gay the same as being a paedophile?” It was asked earnestly and in context. It was my pleasure to answer, ask them more questions, and get them to think about consent and what is and isn’t ok for society to ban.
We talk about filter bubbles of information, but there are also filter bubbles of association. It is easier than ever to surround yourself with people who agree with you about almost everything.
People don't simply consume information and form ideas like a summary-generator. There's a strong component of imitation and rehearsal that is disrupted when the patterns of engagement with other people are drastically changed.
I agree with this "bubble of association" idea, and it doesn't have to start out political. Its just easier than ever to surround yourself with people like you. We have all kinds of segregation in who we live near, and who we associate with. The fact that its less about race than at anytime in history makes it easy for this segregation to hide itself. I live in a red state, but during the election my kids counted the signs in neighbors yards, it was 3:1 Biden. I work in tech, and so do most people in my well off, blue neighborhood. We are racially diverse, but segregated from people who don't think like us. I bet most people in here work at companies that are predominantly liberal or libertarian. I bet most people live in well off neighborhoods surrounded by college educated, worldly people with very little to fear from the world.
But when media organizations peddling outright lies are allowed to call it "news", and are treated as being just as valid as genuine journalistic organizations by the various institutions of our country, it is, for want of a better term, no longer a "free market" of news.
I would argue that this is the result of a free market of news. These media organizations only exist because they tell people what they want to hear. There's a huge market for that. In order to peddle anything, you have to get people to listen first, and you can't take listeners for granted in a society where the media is not controlled by the government.
If only it were that simple, that it's just serving people what they want. Running with that idea for a second, isn't what people want partly a function of propaganda, brainwashing and so on. The narratives that we're fed are largely those of the rich and powerful or, in the case of fringe views on social media, those of often unqualified people at best (and lunatics at worst). The metaphor of a market of people autonomously choosing news obfuscates a much more complex reality about why so many people want to hear nonsense or views that undermine their own interests?
You're correct that the reality is much more complex. To expand, I would say that people are indeed susceptible to propaganda, but only propaganda of a certain kind. It has to reinforce their preexisting biases. You can't just force any propaganda on any arbitrary person, that's not going to work. That's why I say people do it to themselves. They come to trust the public figures who tell them specifically what they specifically want to hear, and then this trust and good feeling can be exploited for other purposes.
That's not unique to any one political party. All political partisans are susceptible to propaganda, but only party-specific propaganda. There are different forms of propaganda on different sides that would never work on the other side.
However, if people are put in a situation where the only information they have access to—or the only information given an official sanction—is the propaganda, then whether or not it conflicts with their existing biases, they're pretty unlikely to be able to refute it. Especially not over a long period of time.
Also worth noting that saying people "do it to themselves" only applies to adults: the adults who are "doing it to themselves" are, in fact, doing exactly what I described above to their children: providing an "official sanction" to only the propaganda that agrees with their biases, thus ensuring that their children grow up molded in the same way, with no easy way to make an informed choice for themselves.
> the adults who are "doing it to themselves" are, in fact, doing exactly what I described above to their children
To an extent, yes. However, there are a number of mitigating factors. (1) Individual parents vary widely in their persuasive skill. (2) If there are 2 parents, those 2 don't necessarily agree in their beliefs, which means mixed messages for the children. (3) The child's friends, neighbors, schools, and community are also important influences on the child. (4) Genetics guarantees individual differences regardless. (5) Kids have a natural tendency to rebel against their parents, regardless of the parent's beliefs.
A lot of kids turn out a lot like their parents. And a lot of kids don't. Some even become the opposite of their parents. So the parental influence is definitely a factor, but it's not inescapable.
In any case, most kids pay very little attention to politics or "hard news" before they reach voting age (or even after). The news consumption itself tends to occur mainly in adulthood.
There are many good points in this thread, which led me to this realization: kids are indeed not very interested in national politics, but they are very attuned to the social politics of their peers, which can be pretty cliquish, isolating and devisive.
The propaganda that we are concerned with here deliberately seeks to trigger these childish responses in adults. If you go around telling people that they are entitled to something which these other people are taking from them, you will get some disciples regardless of whether there is any merit to the claim. It is like a mountainside in snow: you will get many small avalanches, but now and again a big one will let loose and sweep everything away.
It is the result of the free market of news. Bad news drives out good, just as bad money drives out good.
(Bad as in quality, not as in pessimistic. Bad meaning emotional and inciteful rather than informative and constructive. Humans have proven they respond more to the former.)
A true free market requires full information—in this case, that means the ability to determine how trustworthy the "news" being provided by a particular organization is. And there's a big, big difference between an organization that presents genuine facts with a slant (though that can be problematic enough), or one that tries in good faith to provide genuine facts but sometimes fails, either due to bad actors within or simple incompetence, and one that knowingly presents verifiably false information.
"Free market" does not just mean "everyone (with enough money) gets to provide whatever they want, and call it whatever they want, and it's up to ordinary people to figure out what's reliable and what's not."
The genuine sources have issues like bias or sloppy investigating, that leads to outright lies too. For years the media was representing the gender wage gap as being a man and women in the same job with all attributes other than gender being equal (even Obama said this during a state of the union). That clearly isn't what the BLS study says (difference in occupations, in part, drive the wage gap on an aggregate level).
Considering women obtain degrees at a higher rate than men, I'd say there's just as much opportunity.
If you are alluding to family constraints, having a family is a choice. I'm a man with a family and I have seen many opportunities disappear as a result of my decision to have a family.
News is basically a cheap form of entertainment nowadays. The clue really is in the name, it's just "new stuff" and humans seem hardwired to always want to be consuming "new stuff".
In countries in which the truth is defended as OP demands clowns don't tend it to make it into government in the first place, but I see your point it's hard to see how the US gets out of this cycle
"lies shouldn't be allowed"
Uh huh, and who decides what is a lie?
There is a term called "slippery slope" and free speech may have been its founding issue.
Courts. Even USA has laws against libel and slander, it's not like the status quo is that you can just say whatever you want with no fear of consequences.
Well obviously that would be unelected “fact checkers” who aren’t held accountable for anything and suspiciously seem to find nearly everything said by people in one particular political party to be “pants on fire” lies.
You're right to point out the dangers of entrusting an unaccountable group with the responsibility of determining what is and isn't true, but I'm not sure that electing the fact checkers would improve their accuracy.
Also, if you think it is suspicious that people in one political party make statements that are deemed lies, your problem might not be with the checkers.
> Also, if you think it is suspicious that people in one political party make statements that are deemed lies, your problem might not be with the checkers.
Come on, I could easily remove context and/or provide a misleading "authoritative" interpretation to basically anything a Democrat says in order to brand it a lie. How new are you to this game?
This is an interesting point and my sibling comments are wrong: I'm sure the judiciary could provide that accountability, given new law. Even though I think Wikipedia is a failed project (because of it's own guidelines not being followed), it's actually got pretty good guidelines regarding verifiability and due weight:
I'm imagining the media could be structured upon some sort of protocol codified in law that would ensure those guidelines would be respected.
However the main thing that's necessary is probably instilling some sense of duty, honor and integrity in a large number of individuals. No idea how to go about that.
> People should be held accountable for what they say on media platforms, and lies shouldn't be allowed.. but i can't see that even happening.
I've suggested to @dang that he tries implementing a kind of experimental discussion mode like that right here on HN, where for certain types of topics he could enable this mode and see what the effect would be on the human mind.
I don't know all the particulars of what changes should be included in such a mode (would be a good topic for a discussion), but the main one I would include is an additional guideline something along the lines of "Please exert some effort in restricting your statements to the discussion of reasonably conclusive true facts about physical reality."
This way, when people inevitably succumb to mistaking the virtual reality in their mind (where one has supernatural powers like omniscience, the ability to read minds at scale, predict the future with precise accuracy, completely understand infinitely complex indeterminate/chaotic systems, etc) for physical reality (where we do not have these powers), such comments could be flagged and reviewed a few days later (when cooler heads prevail) in a group Post Incident Review process of some sort (maybe a zoom meeting), where we could examine our behavior from a more metaphysical perspective, the goal being to increase awareness of the fact that inaccurate beliefs about reality are not something that only members of our personal outgroups suffer from, but rather something we all suffer from. It is simply a consequence of the same base software we all run in our minds.
Unfortunately, this idea seems to be rather unpopular (shocking!) - so, the beatings will continue until morale improves (or some variation of that), or until this never ending process comes to its natural conclusion. Mother Nature is a cruel mistress.
That's the very point of such a system - to learn to recognize the symptoms of this problem, and how to rectify them. Also, note that bias is not a binary, it is a continuum, and our defaults can be overcome (see the third video linked above for an example).
> I don't think there's a way to system-design ourselves out of this situation.
I personally prefer to try and fail before declaring defeat. After all, how would one know if something isn't possible if no one ever tried it? If our ancestors had this attitude, we'd probably be doing something like having a pleasant ride in our horse and buggies rather than having pointless arguments with people we don't know who live half way around the world.
I'm not sure whether I'd vote for or against this proposal.
I probably would just ignore it entirely, if it was experimental and opt-in.
If it was required, I would probably stop using HN.
Despite trying to be a careful systems thinker and programmer, at my heart of hearts I am a mystic and an artist.
I suspect those parts of my worldview would be largely dismissed as drivel by people who are confident they know the truth and ideas that diverge from theirs as mine do aren't worth considering.
It's unpopular because it's naive. Nobody has the ability to prove everything to themselves and everyone else from first principles. Everyone takes shortcuts by repeating things they were told by others, thus "lying" is occasionally the 5-year old type of lying where someone just makes something up on the spot and tries to avoid looking guilty, but these are not the meaningful or common types of lies. In reality "lies" refer to the personal threshold someone has for edges in a sort of transitive PageRank over the graph of all claims made by all people.
A good way to see this is by looking at what news organisations call "fact checks". Almost always, these are simply repeating the claims of some random academics or government institutions, which are taken to be true by default. A lot of people really do assign a very high prior to "member of the establishment saying something makes it true", but a whole lot of other people do not. If the latter go and dig in and discover the underlying claim seems false, and start saying so, then the news orgs will claim it's "disinformation" and the others will say it's the "lying media" and yet nobody is literally making things up maliciously, even if a claim is objectively true or false.
This comment seems like a fine example of the very phenomenon I am trying to draw people's attention to.
I will try to explain...
> It's unpopular because it's naive.
You have no way of knowing whether this is naive.
> Nobody has the ability to prove everything to themselves and everyone else from first principles.
In no means whatsoever did I state this as a goal or requirement.
> Everyone takes shortcuts by repeating things they were told by others
Agreed. But my point is: people do not realize (in realtime) that they do this - and, this can have severe consequences.
> thus "lying" is occasionally the 5-year old type of lying where someone just makes something up on the spot and tries to avoid looking guilty, but these are not the meaningful or common types of lies.
I am not discussing lies (lying requires conscious intent) - I am discussing the mind's default inability to reliably distinguish between virtual reality and physical reality. This phenomenon can be observed in very high quantities on HN, but only in certain types of threads (culture war topics) - on other topics (computing, physics, etc), one will find very little flawed logic or assertions (relative to other social media sites).
Even if one doesn't think this is worth worrying about, it should at least be considered potentially interesting, considering the consequences of this phenomenon if it exists at scale. Take the climate change debate for example, or 'masks for covid' as a simpler scenario: what is the ACTUAL reason(s) our societies can't sort this shit out?
Should we care about such things, or should we not care? I'm getting very mixed messages on this from every social media site or organization I belong to. There seems to be general consensus that we should care (as a boolean) - but on the degree to which we should care, it seems like some people are opposed to caring too much (when it extends into thinking deeply and precisely, based on first principles (free of axioms and premises) and sound epistemology).
If you are debugging a complex system, would you use skills like precise observation, logic, and systems thinking, or would you just make a few wild guesses and throw up your hands in defeat when your guesses turn out to be ineffective?
> A good way to see this is by looking at what news organisations call "fact checks". Almost always, these are simply repeating the claims of some random academics or government institutions, which are taken to be true by default.
Agreed. This is an example of how 'that which is not true' in physical reality can become "true" in virtual reality.
> A lot of people really do assign a very high prior to "member of the establishment saying something makes it true", but a whole lot of other people do not.
Subconscious bayesian reasoning is often converted to binary when passed to the conscious (or so it seems).
> If the latter go and dig in and discover the underlying claim seems false, and start saying so, then the news orgs will claim it's "disinformation" and the others will say it's the "lying media" and yet nobody is literally making things up maliciously, even if a claim is objectively true or false.
Mostly agree, except for the "nobody is literally making things up maliciously" part - sometimes people actually do make things up with "malicious" intent.
>But when media organizations peddling outright lies are allowed to call it "news", and are treated as being just as valid as genuine journalistic organizations
Where are these "genuine journalistic organizations" defined except in our own minds?
There is no journalist licence. There is no license to publish. You have a printer, and someone to buy what you print out? Congratulations! You're a journalist! In the U.S. anyway.
As it should be. I like to think of journalism as the softest science in that it has a lot of subtlety - hidden connections and dimensions - but ultimately the objective is to be able to infer the state of the world at some time - be it past, present of future - based on some partial information. And just like in regular science, collective knowledge can be leveraged and built upon if enough people take it upon themselves to do spot checks verifying the accuracy of accounts of events to which you might have an informational advantage. This can be via witnessing events first hand or have pre existing depth or via direct consumption of the raw primaries or just going on a dive.
Absolutely. I agree, and did not intend to imply ist should be otherwise. We must all be journalists in a sense, as each of us is to the societal macro-organism as a single sigmoidal node is to a neural network. It's why I think the whole "thou shalt not bear false witness" is actually a severely underrated aspect of reasonable behavior as a human being.
I would say it's a matter of intent, and of capability.
Intent, in that the organization, and the people making it up, genuinely seek to find truth and publish it, rather than seeking to push one agenda or another regardless of the facts.
And capability, in that they can, in fact, do the research and possibly fieldwork necessary to get truths that are interesting enough to be worth publishing, as opposed to just reposting stories someone else researched, whatever their truth value.
Having the intent described above but not the capability makes you something of an aggregator. Having neither capability nor intent makes you, more or less, a partisan blogger.
Having the capability to be journalistic but the intent to push an agenda regardless of the truth makes you an incredibly dangerous propaganda outfit.
Given, but even that test is somewhat dangerous. Where is the line when the Government refuses the truth you are seeking and tries to shut you down for clearly being a propagandist even if you are on the right track?
I'm incredibly leery assigning a particular set of qualities to the essential journalist, even if by and large I do agree with the criteria you state.
All the social media sites did the research and learned that filter bubbles and outrage drives engagement more than anything else. If you tune your systems to maximize engagement and ignore the side effects, the side effects still happen, whether it’s deliberate or not
This is also true of TV, print, and other non-social medias - and that seems to be under commented on HN.
Has existed for longer and I believe started this downhill trajectory, perhaps created the 'tinder' if you will.
They too do it for the engagement/ratings.
Rupert Murdoch's empire as a prime cause creating an alternate reality solely because it made his media the #1 most watched news network, print, etc.
They've even argued in court themselves that any 'normal' person wouldn't take their 'news' seriously. Take Tucker Carlson's early videos as another example of this gross negligence; he's an actor saying what gets views no matter his actual beliefs are.
And making that distinction helps highlight that there are factors in how information is shaped and transmitted through networks of people that results in these outcomes.
Or, hear me out, requiring certain levels of transparency from content systems that have started to augment such fundamental constructs as human-to-human communication and information sharing.
There's nothing inherently wrong with automating content discovery; it's the cost function being optimized that I think we would almost all take issue with.
Agreed. Much of the problem I see is that people can fall down a rabbit hole of polarization without realizing it; no matter how far into the fringes the recommendation algorithm gets, it'll always feel like "oh everyone's saying this" to you as a viewer.
"What happens when you take a creature with a strong confirmation bias and feed it content specifically chosen for congruence with its particular bias?"
Or rather, they knew the answer, but knew that it was the best way to maximize engagement and thus profit.
There still needs to be scope for personal responsibility though. Blaming your own behaviours on the recommendation algorithm of youtube etc is just a cop out.
It's a copout on an individual level, but the question of who's responsible is a lot less important than the question of what we're going to do about the problem. In the absence of a plan to make millions upon millions of partisans more individually responsible, we've gotta do something about the recommendation algorithms.
A cop sees a guy crawling around under a streetlight and asks him, "Sir, what are you doing?"
The man replies, "Well, officer, I dropped my car keys and I'm trying to find them."
The policeman offers to help, and they search fruitlessly for ten minutes.
Finally, the officer says, "Are you sure this is where you dropped them?"
"Oh, no, it's not. I dropped them way over there in the parking lot."
Dumbfounded, the cop says, "WHY are you looking over HERE?"
"Well, the light is better over here."
If it is well known human behaviour, is it their personal responsibility? Especially combined with the deliberate exploitation of said behaviour by corporations?
Rabbit holes are good for most kinds content. I do want to go down a rabbit hole of restoration gardening videos. Its only politics and news which become a problem
Reminds me after the GFC how some of the rules that were brought in were around banning automated real time trading systems. This was in some similar ways recognizing that automated algorithmic treatment can have extremely harmful side effects - even when it successfully executes the goals of its owner (for the stock market - once a certain threshold is breached, get me out of the market as quickly as possible - as an individual, its exactly what I want, for the overall market it is a disaster if everyone does it suddenly).
Indeed. Generally along with blaming the algorithm, as we start using AI, the problem is the algorithm is no longer even understandable in many cases.
Tech companies should be able to explain and demonstrate the logic their systems use. These algorithms should probably be public. And any system which cannot be transparently explained should be shut down.
> These algorithms should probably be public. And any system which cannot be transparently explained should be shut down.
But what would even count as an explanation, and what does a "public" algorithm reveal?
There is no line of code that says "if (video.content == extreme) { show_to(EVERYONE) }".
A lot of the dangers are possible from a simple algorithm which merely performs A/B testing on whether a certain (randomly chosen, at first) video increases the amount of time a user spends on a site.
You could pass a law against A/B testing, or require companies to provide deliberately bad suggestions to make their users frustrated, but I'm not sure if that is a proportionate legislative response.
That sort of gets to the heart of it - saying "it's impossible to explain my algorithm because it is so complicated" no longer cuts it. It's the same as if I said to the FDA "This drug works in our testing for the indicated purpose but we have no idea if there are side effects" they aren't go to say "well, OK then, you can sell it". They'll say "come back when you have tested for all possible side effects and you can precisly define its behavior"
Currently Facebook, Google et al, will measure a narrow set of metrics to define the success of their algorithms (primarily relating to $$$) and then declare victory based on empirical optimisation of those metrics. They have to show that not only does the algorithm work for its stated purpose, it doesn't have undesirable side effects. They could do massive testing to demonstrate a huge range of side effects are not present. That would be similar to and probably as expensive as drug development. But an easier way to do that is to transparently explain what the algorithms do so that side effects can be predicted. If that is actually impossible for a given algorithm - well, maybe that algorithm shouldn't be used on the public at all.
If a company can't explain why a given user was shown a given video, at a given time, that system is faulty and should be prohibited. Which is to say, there's nothing particularly wrong with complicated rules and scoring systems making recommendations, but things like black box neural networks should not be able to be used for this stuff.
Let me give you an example of a good system: Spam filters not operated by Google. Algorithms decide whether or not mail gets through my corporate mail filter. It determines it based on a score, which is tallied from a set of rules. And you can drill down and see the score a spam email received, and then you can see the rules and factors that created that score. As a user, you can even generally see this, because the results are included in the message's headers in your inbox. And if you're the admin, you can then adjust those rules to fix errant behavior.
That's how a recommendation system should work. A system which can't be analyzed in that matter should not exist, and the rules and scoring applied to such systems should be disclosed in some sort of header.
The spam filter works because only you can see the scores of the emails. If the rules of Google search and Youtube were more transparent, spammers would always be one step ahead of spam detection, so everyone would lose in the end.
This is false. Spammers can and do test their own emails against spam filters. And the less transparent ones, like Gmail's often suffer longer failures to detect new strategies spammers are using.
There are enough unique filters that a spammer cannot hope to account for them all in a timely manner. Getting .001% of spam emails past Gmail's filters is much more efficient than getting 100% of emails past my personal Thunderbird spam filter.
That's a valid argument for not using Gmail, but that in the case of Youtube, almost everyone wants a single place where they can watch all the user-generated videos.
> almost everyone wants a single place where they can watch all the user-generated videos
I have my doubts this is true, so much as people are used to the relatively common controls/experience that comes with clicking a YouTube link. If I gave you a link to ocdtrekkietube.com/s8fsj2 (not a real link), and it worked as well as YouTube, I'm not sure any user would be particularly upset about it.
The biggest reason YouTube is as powerful as it is is that video hosting is expensive and few companies can eat that kind of bandwidth and storage without being an ad giant.
We're talking about Youtube's recommendation algorithms here, not their video hosting. Imagine if Youtube hosted the same videos, but provided no homepage, recommendations, or search engine. People would still gravitate towards a single source where they can watch all the content they want. There may be some more competition, such as a liberal recommendation engine, a conservative one, and one for teenagers. However, these websites/apps would likely face all the same problems that Youtube does today.
My iphone indexes photos and labels all the ones with dogs in it. I don't care how this system works and likely the answer is some black box NN. Why should this system be shut down when it causes no harm and works pretty well?
> Why should this system be shut down when it causes no harm and works pretty well?
You believe it causes no harm, but that doesn't make for a good assumption, considering image recognition NNs have been repeatedly demonstrated to be racist. So you may find it's classification of dogs might work really well, but it might label other people's coworkers or family members as dogs.
I still don't see why I should care since its only for my personal use. I agree in other areas like law enforcement and news curation this is an issue but for my personal photo search all I care about is that it works pretty well, which it does. Some mistakes are fine here.
Which is my main point, why should this apply to all tech when in some cases unexplainable mistakes are fine?
In many cases making a neural network explainable is literally impossible. Logic based AI failed in the 90s and only though neural nets have we gotten to human and superhuman level advances. If you want explainability it's going to require giving up a lot of innovation that could help people. Especially when we ourselves can't explain our own behavior psychologically.
> In many cases making a neural network explainable is literally impossible.
Then it should be illegal to use on consumer websites. It's that simple.
> If you want explainability it's going to require giving up a lot of innovation that could help people.
Four people died in the US Capitol because of this "innovation". It's time to stop pretending technology doesn't cause more harm than good in these cases.
I don't like when people try to stop or slow down technological innovation. Technologies are just tools, a nuclear bomb could just as easily have been made into a nuclear power plant. But to fully restrict them shows a lack of foresight. Yes, recommender systems can be used for bad, as yesterday, but they can also be good.
It's likely unrestricted technological innovation will inevitably cause the end of the human species, and your own example demonstrates why: In our rush to create the nuclear bomb, several times we came close to obliterating all life on earth due to simple mistakes. Several times, the hesitation of one man was the only thing that prevented our planet's complete annihilation.
The nuclear bomb is exactly why we need to block "innovation" that causes more harm than good.
And yet nuclear energy is one of the highest latent energy sources we have, orders of magnitude above solar, wind, coal and so on. If we blocked progress, then we'd have never discovered this.
The question is, how do you know something is bad before developing it? You oftentimes can't put the genie back in the bottle.
I would so love to have sliders on Youtube to be able to adjust bias filtering, and watch the suggested videos switch sides in real time.
This would probably get me to pay for the subscription.
Both FB and YouTube's top shared posts and video are super right-leaning, though (YouTube has other massively popular videos, but they are about gaming or influencer stuff). What would the equivalent "liberal" viral posts be, and why aren't they nearly as popular as the right's?
My bet is that Facebook’s user demographic skews old and white, and that explains their posting. If you go somewhere like Reddit or TikTok you’ll see an entirely different story.
Elsewhere in this thread the point is made that the opposite of a viral conservative video isn’t a viral liberal video. It’s either a moderate video, or no video at all.
(This might be the very point you are making, rhetorically?)
Doesn't matter, assuming you allow people to pick who they follow. Try to look at the twitter feed of somebody who disagrees with you on a topic you find important - most the posts will be insults towards those who disagree with that persons POV.
Why can't there be a Giant Lever on the side that inputs a variable into the Magic Algorithms that you can adjust. Up down, left or right, whatever you want to call it. Why would you do this - even if people never touch it: because at least people KNOW there's a decision-tree at play here.
Also there MUST be some randomization or more generalized content introduced. And I'm not talking Trending Now or Hit Songs That Just Came Out. I'm looking at you, YouTube and Facebook. Sometimes I actually want new stuff and it keeps dragging me back into a virtual rabbit hole.
Probably worth distinguishing between Algorithms targeting individuals and Algorithms running an entire site. Yes HN is algorithmic but you and I see the same things.
We blame algorithms and optimization a lot here but that analysis always glosses over the fact that people pick their own sources and form their own bubbles.
Everyone’s Youtube subscriptions are an echo chamber of views they mostly agree with because people only click subscribe on such channels.
A recommendation engine working perfectly is going to show you lateral channels that might be more or less extreme of the last one. But that’s not the root of the problem.
You are being naive. I wanted to see what the impact of a 50 caliber looks like on iron plates. This is just a childish curiosity for things that go bang. Immediately I was bombarded with recommendations of barely concealed white supremacists, and bizarre conspiracy theorists. I know that if I clicked on even one of them, then my recommendations will be full of that crap. Similarly, watch one motivational video, and Youtube decides "oh! I see!! so that's what you really want. Here's a deluge of 'similar' crap."
What I want to know about is more coherent explanations of abstract math and some scientific experiments which I never got to see in school, in addition to comedy. That I watch something else once in a while is not really an indication of my identity or my Jungian shadow self.
> I was bombarded with recommendations of barely concealed white supremacists, and bizarre conspiracy theorists. I know that if I clicked on even one of them, then my recommendations will be full of that crap.
You were offered the recommendations, but you declined. It's still a matter of self-selection and self-exposure. How many recommendations would it take to turn you into a white supremacist? How many video viewings? If your answer is that no amount would, then the algorithms don't seem to be the real problem.
I did decline. But I have seen many of my parents' generation getting increasingly radical (I am not American, BTW. I am talking about India). They don't have the tools to understand what is going on. Their entire life was training to "read between the lines" of newspaper articles and journals. They are used to subtle lies and distortions, and they can catch that. Blatant outright virulent rhetoric - with the tone "this is some truth that must be told" - is ok in 1 or 2 videos. But the recommendation engine enmeshes them in that mire.
My mother is a PhD. I asked her whether she will accept a paper without sound academic bibliography. She said no. Then why would she believe in extremist videos with shady citations and outright lies? But she does. I think it is because of the recommendation engines which keep feeding similar videos. Just like Goebbels' maxim of repeating a lie often enough and loudly enough to make it the truth.
We can keep saying that our algorithms are fine. But if what we see today has never been seen in history, I think it is high time that we re-evaluate our current beliefs about the impact and the correctness of our work.
> I asked her whether she will accept a paper without sound academic bibliography. She said no. Then why would she believe in extremist videos with shady citations and outright lies?
This is very common. I would even say the norm. No person is fully rational. Rather, people may think rationally about certain things — their "speciality", perhaps — but not about others. Everyone is irrational in some ways.
> But if what we see today has never been seen in history
Which part do you think is historically unprecedented? The technology of course is unprecedented, but I don't see anything about the beliefs of people today that's unprecedented.
There was once a time when newspapers were never before seen in history. Just as your parents' generation learnt how to detect misinformation in newspapers, they and new generations will learn to detect misinformation in new forms of media. People adapt, we always have. I'm sure when your parents were young or during the early days of journalism, there were problems and misunderstandings when reading newspapers. It didn't really warrant rushing out to end freedom of the press or calling to halt newspapers.
Just because you share more things in common with those you hate doesn't mean the recommendation is broken.
If a large percentage of people who watch gun blowing up videos also are interested in the videos you mention than why wouldn't they show it (I assume if it were breaking guidelines it would be removed)
The recommendation should be based on what a large fraction of my time is spent on (average over the timeline of my history), rather than a large of fraction of people who watch the last watched video is based on. Why does one video entirely screw up my historical record? I can't remember being recommended one 3Blue1Brown video in the last year, despite being subscribed to him. It's bizarre.
Pretty much. I watch some pretty left-wing political commentators on YouTube along with math/cs/physics videos and some geostratrgy videos, and all it takes is for me to watch one gun video by curiosity or one Joe Rogan video and leave YouTube playing to come back to some extremely questionable content. There's a sinkhole effect somewhere here.
IMO autoplay for anything but music is one of the worst decisions ever made on online streaming services.
Kind of reminds me how repeatedly clicking the first link on Wikipedia articles inevitably leads to the article about Philosophy, but diverging instead of converging.
I think algorithms have more of an effect than you give them credit. Anecdotally on the occasion I've been linked to or suggested a Jordan Peterson/Moon Landing conspiracy videos on Youtube, after watching just one my feed is absolutely packed with that type of content for up to a week.
It's fairly easy to see how this can lead people who did not already hold those viewpoints down a rabbit hole where they end up far more radicalised than they would have otherwise been, especially since I've not once seen Youtube put any sort of "rebuttal" videos in amongst the "illuminati aliens are controlling your government" ones.
My (logged out) YouTube feed has mostly cooking shows, programming videos, stuff about crafts and watchmaking etc, because those are mostly what I like to watch.
I’m also interested in guns. The moment I watch a gun video, I immediately get shown Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and The Blaze instead of all the cooking videos etc.
And yet none of the gun videos I watch are remotely political. They are exclusively about sports and history, and don’t even talk about gun politics, let alone politics in general.
I watch lots of videos on guns, cars, metalworking and history with the former two mostly geared toward history and manufacturing.
I never see (amateur) political talking heads recommended. It's all trash pop-history talking heads, semi-trash documentaries and low brow entertainment related to cars and guns (e.g. demo ranch and whistlin diesel).
I recently (like yesterday) watched a semi-political talking head discuss the economics of OnlyFans after a friend linked to that particular person's analysis so it'll be interesting to see if the algo tries to drag my content toward more talking heads.
Interesting. I imagine there is more to it than just the videos.
E.g. if you live in a generally pro-gun area I think they be algorithm would probably be less likely to assume that it’s worth showing you political content.
I guess its obvious that the algo must work for a large enough number of people and for its optimization function.
You may simply be that % of the false positive/false negative that is a cost of doing business.
I mean - the alternative to this is having Google employ all the out of work journalists and editors and manually curate lists for people. I think the cost of losing a few people is vastly lower than hiring that many people, in each culture and country around the world.
I've had mostly the same experience with youtube. I wanted to get into woodworking during COVID lockdowns, so I was watching a lot of popular woodworking channels that had nothing to do with politics, and was frequently shown Trump ads. Then once I realised how expensive woodworking would be, I started watching videos about game development. After ~1 week, all the Trump ads disappeared, and I started getting Biden ads.
> The moment I watch a gun video, I immediately get shown Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and The Blaze instead of all the cooking videos etc.
I know recommendations are based on many factors that differ between us (such as location), but I can't reproduce that behavior. If I watch hickok45 or Paul Harrell in an incognito window, I get recommendations for more of their videos along with a few from Demolition Ranch, Forgotten Weapons, and other gun channels. I see no political videos in the recommendations.
Interesting - well those are are the kinds of people I watch.
I’m using AppleTV, but not logged in. It’s possible that it takes some time for that to happen.
Also, I watched a Jerry Miculek Video yesterday, and got no political stuff, so it’s also possible that the algorithm has been improved or they have specifically acted to break this association.
> And yet none of the gun videos I watch are remotely political.
Sure, but to assume that you _probably_ hold conservative beliefs due to having an interest in guns is way more often the case than not. Same is true in an opposite way if you watched some video on abortion rights.
“to assume that you _probably_ hold conservative beliefs due to having an interest in guns is way more often the case than not“
Only in the crudest statistical sense. For example the fastest growing demographic of gun owners is black women, who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters.
And that’s exactly what the complaint about these algorithms is.
That these algorithms are crude statistical approximators of hidden latent biases in the training data? That's their entire method of functioning! That's the entire process of a neural network. It seems you're wanting something that can predict the future, which is currently outside of our matrix multiplication skills.
During elections, before I stopped using facebook, I used to try to follow everybody I could from every side of the political spectrum to try to get a more balanced feed. My goodness, my feed was immediately full of insane conspiracy theories, white nationalist group posts, communist posts, nothing but stories of subjugation and oppression of everybody from every side. The choice I made was to try to broaden my bubble, but what I got was insane
Its worth noting that the companies that decided to not do this are not huge megacorps, so there is an argument to be made that anybody who isn't aggressively chasing engagement just can't get a seat at the table anymore. Am I mistaken about that? This sort of makes it a systemic problem, not necessarily a problem that a company leader can solve. Eg, not even Google+ with all its resources was able to dislodge Facebook.
Exactly. Is why we outlawed underage drinking and hard drugs. Once you get a taste you can’t say no even if you want to. The problem is not humans and human nature. The problem is that social media exploits human nature in a new way. It’s not going away without regulation, in the same way we have regulated countless other human ills.
Most media companies under capitalism end up acting like a paperclip maximizing AI[1]. They will eat the entire planet to get a few more eyeballs because no one taught them not to.
In communism anyone who opposes the state is disappeared.
In capitalism anyone who opposes the corporation is disappeared.
You end up needing a mix of both. An independent news media with an explicit obligation to the truth, one that they can get in trouble for violating. We had that obligation for a long time through the middle of the 20th century. News organizations were well regarded even if they didn't always make the right calls they tried their best.
But then Rhupert Murdock realized that you could simply pretend to be one of those respected parties and lie to the viewers constantly and there would be no consequences. The obligation to the truth turned out to be a gentleman's agreement and there were no truth police breaking down your door when you told lies. That's when we discovered that the media is like the Prisoner's Dilemma. Fox news discovered that as long as everybody else was beholden to the facts they could lie repeatedly and constantly win the game. They've only fallen from the very tippy top of the ratings in recent years as other news organizations like OAN have discovered that the bigger the lie the bigger the ratings.
Fast forward to today and respect for the independent media (the all important 4th branch of government) is at an all time low and we have completely indoctrinated delusional people storming the Capitol building.
Well said. You answered that sibling comment that I refused to answer.
I am not a fan of the specifics of the fairness doctrine, but I believe the current state in which media companies can freely and knowingly lie as long as they don't stray too far into defamation is not tenable.
If you study political philosophy (e.g. Plato, Hobbes, Locke etc..) and read stuff like Orwell's Animal Farm, I think it becomes pretty evident that it ultimately won't matter how you structure society, whether that's a mix (of communism/capitalism), or having all of one or the other. Just using a simple thought experiment, you can show that the sheer existence of two or more people, can potentially give rise to situations where inequality becomes inevitable. In which case, leads to Hobbes's arguments about the state of nature.
None, as you well know. But it has been the result when self-proclaimed communists succeed in taking control of a state.
The well-known phrase "it wasn't real communism" comes to mind because it applies and is true, since of course these results have never followed to the letter Marx's doctrine and intentions. But given the pattern of authoritarian states that follow every attempt at communism it is logical to conclude that the plan as stated simply does not survive in any desirable fashion once it starts being followed by real people to organize real people.
Capitalism and Republicanism (and no, for some people in the US that need the clarification: I certainly don't mean the party) as perfect plans also fail allowing a lot of evil to flourish, but their failure modes have performed much better in the long run than everything else so far. You can pinpoint any flaws you want, but you can't argue the results as there is no real counterexample with universally better ones.
Constitutional monarchies, specially the more successful ones, are in practice mostly indistinguishable from a republic. The powerless diplomatic figure that is the monarch does not impact the overall decision making in any meaningful way.
Sweden and Canada fit that definition as well, and are not socialist countries according to what Marx meant by socialism. They're very much countries with a foundation of ownership rights and private enterprise, but taxed to a certain extent as to fund extensive government welfare programs. Of course, I'm not unaware that socialism is a word used loosely these days but within the context of discussing communism it's important to drive home the difference.
And of course, as someone that doesn't belong to any of the mentioned countries, I would say that the sentiment that a government like Sweden's or Canada's is better to live in than (pardon if I'm reaching here) the country that I believe you had in mind when making the comparison, is not only not universally accepted but very heavily debated across the world.
Constitutional monarchies tend to have a symbolic figurehead for the public to emotionally invest themselves in, but who is restrained from exploiting that public affection for political gain. I think this is valuable.
It is a major difference though, since they could do something if there's some large issue.
In a republic, the person with that power is also the person usually making the decisions, so when those decisions are bad, there isn't another party with the power to stop them.
In Canada at least(Canadian here) the Governor general does step in at times to prorogue or dismiss the government.
Socialism lost all proper meaning in the McCarthy era, but Canada and Sweden are specifically not capitalism in the way that capitalists say free markets are always better. The US is more capitalists than both those countries, and is worse off for it.
Certainly if you consider it hotly debated, you can't say that capitalist republicanism is the least bad, since alternatives are equivalent
I think Capitalism is the failure of society. Where I live, I have to pay someone to be able to sleep inside, to eat, to travel, to communicate, to access information. And the only way to make those payments is to obey one person or another who gets power that trickled down from the top.
Socialism is nothing but the attempt to fix these things by organizing like minded good people to be social. It might not always work, and nothing can last forever, but to the extent it does, I think that is the measure of good over evil in society.
A capitalist republic is the organization of like minded authoritarians who maintain a class of people like me to use as labor and manage via economics and trade.
As I see it socialism is the only sincere attempt at a fair society and republican capitalism is just authoritarianism with a delegation-style of management. IE: federal bank pays a corporation that bids on a job. corporation pays producers. producers pay servants. and on down the pyramid. And all the way down, there is no accountability to any good or fairness. In fact, the opposite is protected, because the way that an authority wants to treat their subordinates is considered human rights in capitalism. they call it privacy. corruption is the system. Pursuit of happiness (a euphemism for greed) is good.
I think fair access to natural resources without needing permission is human rights. I believe that is called socialism. I don't demand service or subordination from anyone, just fairness, by which i mean equal or at least a minimum basic access to land or material resources to live. Capitalists demand service from me and respect for their perspective that i don't own resources and they do since they have exploited and conquered more people than I have, which they call fairness.
The state = The status. It doesn't disappear people. Capitalism and crime disappear people. This just means the state is poor/capitalist.
An elected body is not the state. It is just an organizing scheme for people to communicate and participate in the kind of economy where 1 person = 1 vote and no one is allowed to gain more or less influence than that except by true social means aka popularity.
Your argument reminds me of people arguing against the scientific method because most or all scientists make mistakes. It just means you need better science. Science isn't a guarantee, but it is an ideal method of determining objective truth. Capitalism is the false utopia, with invisible hand and other superstitions. Socialism makes no such promise. It doesn't promise equality of outcomes. It is just a method for fairness. It is democracy that has not been corrupted by respect for unaccountable accumulation of private control or power.
It doesn't sound like you want to engage in this discussion in good faith if you are treating it as a binary choice between capitalism and communism. Any radical extreme is going to bad.
EDIT: My views largely align with what jandrese said here[1].
As this is HN, I really believe that this lack of a shared reality is only possible with the Internet. Before the Internet, there were more conservative sources and more liberal sources, but never before could you completely surround yourself with your own version of reality. And more importantly, your version of reality is constantly reinforced by algorithms that are specifically designed to raise your level of rage (aka "engagement").
I certainly don't know what the right answer here is, or even if there is one. The flip side of this polarization is the Internet has allowed discriminated groups to organize (e.g. see the "It Gets Better Project")
Historically, lack of a shared reality has been the rule. The idea that we all inhabit one reality is a construct of modernity, with the rise of mass production, mass media, and mass culture. Before the printing press there was no way for ideas to spread far enough to create a shared reality across a whole nation; indeed, the concept of a nation dates from this time. The closest you got was religion, but religions had a knack for splitting into sects and then bitterly fighting each other - witness the Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion that followed. Those wars were specifically fought over whose version of reality (both of which seem very quaint today) was true: each believed that the other was an existential threat to eternity.
The Internet just ushered in post-modernism on a global scale, which undoes a lot of the thought-unification (some would say thought-control) that came with modernity.
Building on the history theme here; plenty of modern revolutions have been preceeded by a rise in polarising media. The french revolution had the pulp paper of Jean-Paul Marat [0], the soviets had Lenin's writings [1], and the Nazis had Julius Streicher's Der Sturmer [2]. It's not difficult to draw comparisons to Bannon's Breitbart here.
Nit: the first issue of Marat's "L'Ami du peuple" wasn't published until several months after the fall of the Bastille and thus played no role in radicalizing the populace prior to the Revolution.
But the broader point that the French Revolution was proceeded by a radicalized literature [0] is accurate (Sieyes' "What is the Third Estate?" is the most famous work [1]). Though it's contribution to the origins of the Revolution is the matter of some debate [2].
Thanks this is a great nit pick :) My knowledge on this topic is hazy at best so I jumped to the most famous populist screed writer of the french revolution.
Correlation does not imply causation. Moreover, when hasn't there been polarizing media? There are countless radical publications that did not imminently result in a political revolution. Also, today's afternoon riot doesn't really compare with the aforementioned historical events.
You could do a pretty good job of bubbling yourself up starting in the 90s with talk radio + Fox News... tons of fun vitriol towards Clinton... my parents have been on that train for a while now.
Exactly what I've experienced with my dad. He went from someone I idolized who could fix anything and solve any problem to the guy who rants about Muslims coming to kill us while building up a stock pile of guns.
How do you know your dad wasn't always that person? Children tend to be pretty naive about their own parents. Children very rarely have a sophisticated understanding of issues such as politics and race, so they wouldn't even notice problematic aspects of their parents until they become adults themselves.
I remember learning about Dyson spheres from him when I was much younger, but most recently he could only talk about god, guns and fighting against the liberal agenda. He legitimately devolved over the years to a shadow of what he used to be. I know memory is fickle and kids idolize their parents, but I got over that delusion before he went completely off the deep end. He has been a truck driver all my life. My experiences basically mirror those talked about in the documentary.
I feel you; very much the same situation for me, and I can pinpoint it to exactly when my dad started listening to Rush Limbaugh as he drove around in the course of his work. This would have been when he was about the age I am now, so it doesn’t seem right to me that it was his age. He was curious, smart, kind, and optimistic, then came Rush Limbaugh. After that, he had no interest in anything other than talking about how big government was ruining his life and the world.
My theory is pretty simple: anger (and especially anger with an object of blame) is like a drug, and he got addicted. I think it’s as simple as that.
> He was curious, smart, kind, and optimistic, then came Rush Limbaugh.
This is the story I never believe. My reaction to hearing Rush Limbaugh is the desire to shut it off ASAP. Don't you have to willingly invite him into your life? To listen and enjoy and want to listen more, to even "experiment" with the drug of anger with an object of blame, is not very indicative of kind and optimistic IMO.
The thing is, people are complex. They can be very kind... to their own kind, if you know what I mean. Alternatively, some parents can be kind to everyone else's kids and be abusive toward their own. It's almost always nuanced. You may only see side one side of a person, even if you think you know them better than anyone else.
Rush Limbaugh wasn't the beginning though. For example, listening to Coast to Coast AM where they talk about alien stories and conspiracy theories which start off as a way to pass the time when you've got a 12 hour haul across the middle of nowhere and very few other options. Keep in mind, most of this started well before podcasts and Bluetooth so your options were extremely limited across vast sections of the country. I can see how a show like that could appeal to someone intellectually curious about things who initially just dismisses some of the wackier stuff. But that's just the beginning of the radicalization pipeline. No reasonable person just starts on Rush. They work their way up through softer, easier to swallow drugs first.
This is similar to how I view 4chan. I almost went down that path because I started viewing it as an edgy teen and thought it's just fun and memes, no one takes this stuff seriously. But over time it becomes normalized and they do start taking it seriously. Looking at it now and I assume as a "normal" person seeing it for the first time, it's crazy.
> But that's just the beginning of the radicalization pipeline. No reasonable person just starts on Rush.
This sounds more plausible. However, it's in direct conflict with the claim "I can pinpoint it to exactly when my dad started listening to Rush Limbaugh".
I feel that there's a whiff of "Reefer Madness" in the hysteria against partisan media, as if mere exposure will drive unsuspecting innocents mad.
I take your point but I feel like that’s not unlike saying “a good person would never abuse alcohol because they’d know it was a risk to their family’s happiness”. Dad definitely had a lot of frustrations - he was low income and a single parent, and I think the draw of AM talk radio was that it provided an explanation as to why his hardships weren’t his fault.
By that argument you could say the cigarette industry isn’t the cause of tobacco addiction.
Anyhoo, I agree with you on the politics of the matter, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether my dad was a good person who fell into the sway of bad influences or was a bad person all along.
> By that argument you could say the cigarette industry isn’t the cause of tobacco addiction.
The crucial difference is that cigarettes are targeted at children, and the majority of smokers become addicted before they become adults. Whereas the audience for Limbaugh, Fox News, etc., skews much much older. Everyone is complaining about how their dad was brainwashed, not about how their child was brainwashed. How many smokers start as dads rather than as teenagers?
(To further clarify: Alcoholics are a minority of alcohol drinkers. The majority of drinkers drink simply because they enjoy drinking, and they could quit if they wanted to without withdrawal symptoms. In fact I quit drinking entirely when the pandemic started, for several reasons, and I'm fine, I feel like I could continue abstaining indefinitely with no ill effects. Thus, I don't consider the purpose of the alcohol industry to be hooking junkies, whereas that's almost unavoidable with nicotine, which is medically established to be highly addictive.)
> we’ll have to agree to disagree about whether my dad was a good person who fell into the sway of bad influences or was a bad person all along.
I don't believe in such black and white, good and bad people. As I said, people are complex. "It's almost always nuanced. You may only see side one side of a person". I think we're all flawed, just in different ways. My claim is that Rush Limbaugh is not a magical snake charmer, he's a guy who tells some people what they want to hear, otherwise how do you explain how you yourself are "magically" immune to his charms?
This is the missing piece in the explanatory puzzle about propaganda. It's easy to point out, but you can't jump to conclusions about its effectiveness without explaining why you who are pointing it out were not affected.
If propaganda comes in small amounts, it will not be apparent and one can fall victim of it.
If it comes in a sudden, big quantity, people may react with disgust and be more wary of similar content in smaller amounts.
For an example, younger people can easily be effected watching videos with slight racism. Yet if you were to put a straight up neonazi speech in front of them, they would probably be disgusted.
There are other factors though that can't be discounted. It's indisputable that he's older now. It's quite natural that many people get "worse" when they get older, a phenomenon that has always existed. Also, people raising children at home have different priorities and interests than "empty nesters" whose children have grown and left home. It's unsurprising that your father's behavior around you would be very different now as an adult than when you were young.
How exactly did he get into listening to that stuff? Were there no other choices? Not music? Not NPR?
For a lot of us it happened in adulthood, where we were definitely aware of our parents' beliefs and values before, as they changed, and after their radicalization.
That explanation doesn't quite fit with historical opinion polls. It wasn't until 2000 that strong dislike of the opposing party shot up, and dislike had been slowly growing before that. But it is possible that the sudden change in trajectory was delayed by the 4 year election cycle, which puts politics in the fore of people's minds for durations that are too short for contempt to really snowball.
> If Fox News had a DNA test, it would trace its origins to the Nixon administration. In 1970, political consultant Roger Ailes and other Nixon aides came up with a plan to create a new TV network that would circumvent existing media and provide "pro-administration" coverage to millions. "People are lazy," the aides explained in a memo. "With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you." Nixon embraced the idea, saying he and his supporters needed "our own news" from a network that would lead "a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition." Alas, his fantasy network did not come into being at that time, and the 37th president was soon engulfed in the Watergate scandal. At first, Republicans dismissed the scandal as a Washington Post "witch hunt." But then the White House tapes proved beyond doubt that Nixon had used the levers of government to pursue vendettas against his opponents and cover up his extensive skulduggery. Disgusted GOP leaders, including Sen. Howard Baker of the Senate Watergate committee, chose principles over party. Nixon was forced to resign.
> “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”
Thanks for sharing those sources. The HN crowd overestimates the impact of social media and under estimates the impact of Fox News and Fox News clones. The typical Fox News viewer watches 4 HOURS every day: https://www.foxnews.com/media/fox-news-august-ratings-most-w...
Please show me the evidence that CNN was created in response to a Democratic scandal in order to consolidate their messaging and provide a friendly news outlet. Until then, you're "enlightened centrist" and "both sides bad" narrative reeks of conservative FUD.
So you're admitting that it's not the same and that CNN wasn't created explicitly by Democrats as a response to a scandal in an attempt to control their narrative for decades? Thanks for that.
I heard the argument that US used to more homogeneous ( which was reinforced by the media forcing the same values ). Now that the franchise increased with more groups trying to grab a slice, the values clashed. In other words, the people were always there, but were either not visible, ignored or marginalized.
Nah, any form of mass communication works. Newspapers (and other written publications) started plenty of wars after the printing press was invented, radio caused a few social experiments starting in the 1930s, and TV starting in the 60s.
Regardless of what view point you have, it's become painful to watch/consume news on either side if you don't subscribe to their same left/right view point as what is being presented. The MSM has overplayed its hand over the past several years to the point they've been written off by their opposing sides. So that forces a dividing line so you don't even bother looking at the opposing news sources, and when ever you do it's so biased it makes your head spin. But hey, ratings are through the roof!
That has allowed traditionally marginalized news sources that embrace less-vetted news to shine. Say what you want about Alex Jones, but he was covering Jeffery Epstein's lolita express/island in 2008 and no one would touch that story back then. So now we have the marginalized news sources ending up larger viewerships than the national evening news. So while you do get real news which is less skewed left or right than in the MSM, it is wrapped with plenty of crap and is less vetted.
The news industry, politicians, and big tech censorship has made this problem. Now they get to lay in their beds. It sucks, I'm not a fan of what's going on in DC right now, but I also don't blame those doing what they feel they must for their country. They are merely products of the system that made them. Until the MSM and politicians decide to stop twisting everything for market share or political gain this will continue to escalate. And we know that won't happen sadly.
As much as I'd like to blame the news (they are partially responsible, especially for keeping contention going), I think we as a people are also to blame. How often do we point to people with different points of view from us and say 'How Dare You!'. We could all cool it a bit, or at least be a little more generous, and I think people wouldn't be quite as alarmed, and this situation might be less likely. We've stoked the fires of emnity and now we're reaping the rewards.
Honestly, I think it's only people to blame. No media would restrict you from just going to your neighbour who's having opposite values and views, and simply talk and try and understand.
People voluntarily selected extreme toxic partisanship, media just feeding the hungry ones. Even half of this thread could be reduced to "these other people are just dumb their values are wrong that's the problem"
Naturally these things are mutually reinforcing in a vicious cycle. It's a little bit of all of the above. We probably can't point to a single root cause, or a single cure. Until we learn how to reason about massively distributed complex social feedback loops, the best we can do is try to address each systemic problem using our best selves.
This strongly resonates with me. Somewhere along the way we allowed ourselves to lose more and more empathy and kindness toward people who think differently than us.
This reminds me of that video about a Russian spy being interviewed saying how Russia's spy efforts are being focused on making the USA population hate eachother. And I'm not saying this IS the result of Russia but it sure seems like this prediction is getting more true every day.
After Trump was elected, I started checking Fox News regularly (my go-to's are the BBC and NPR). On the whole, I think it's been informative as to how others perceive the world. It was definitely interesting when their tone shifted on the election outcome.
> It was definitely interesting when their tone shifted on the election outcome.
This was pretty intriguing to me, because I do believe Fox had a lot to do with the radicalization of their side of things. It drove their support, and the moment they backed off from the crazy train, people abandoned them in droves for whatever agreed with the direction they were heading, be it Newsmax or OAN. Fox brought on it's own downfall here.
I tune in the AM radio for this- the rhetoric on it now was only available on shortwave in the 90s. TYT and friends on youtube for the left's view- I can't stand MSNBC.
Please stop equating the "MSM" with the right wing propaganda machine like FOX. This hyperpolarization is happening in every country that has a sizable Murdoch media machine.
It really isn’t just Fox. They don’t have a lot of shame about their partisanship or desire to hide it, but there is ideological distortion going on everywhere.
It doesn’t matter very much if one side is more crass, or tells more obvious lies.
It matters a lot if everybody has derelicted the attempt to represent views and understandings across the spectrum, and it’s important that we be able to distinguish that situation from just blaming a particular actor.
Perhaps you have something deeper to offer though?
Dishonest reporting is not a quality inherent to arbitrary political labels, there is no "spectrum", there are only "particular actors" and people decide in real time which particular actors they prefer to focus their attention on.
No. It's true in the sense that you cannot impugn a particular part of the spectrum for the actions of individuals because there is no way to reliably quantify dishonesty much less attribute its distribution across a poorly defined political continuum.
> Without further explanation this is just a frame which doesn’t add meaning on its own.
In other words, dishonesty is everywhere and it's trivial to collate a mountain of cherry-picked evidence from a particular part of the continuum to support the conclusion that a certain part of the continuum is dishonest.
> Overall it’s not clear what you have added here.
Your pretentious snark is bad form and unnecessary.
“Overall it’s not clear what you have added here.“
This isn’t pretentious snark. It’s an expression of surprise, and feedback that you really don’t seem to be making a clear point.
You reduced my original comment to “everyone is biased, this is not a deep insight”.
I thought you might have something deeper to add, so I was surprised not to see it.
“It's true in the sense that you cannot impugn a particular part of the spectrum for the actions of individuals because there is no way to reliably quantify dishonesty much less attribute its distribution across a poorly defined political continuum.”
This seems like a re-statement of the original comment I made in response to the post about FOX. I guess we agree about that.
It continues not to be clear what you are trying to add.
> It really isn’t just Fox. They don’t have a lot of shame about their partisanship or desire to hide it, but there is ideological distortion going on everywhere.
Yes, we agree on this point, what I'm critiquing is your injection of this obvious fact into a discussion about a specific event that can be attributed to the particular type of misinformation spread by FOX, the fact that "there is ideological distortion going on everywhere" is beside the point, obviously that's true, so what? If an oil spill dumps millions of barrels into the ocean and someone exclaims "wow, these oil spills are really destroying the environment" your response is akin to "yes, but pollution is a global problem that includes more than just oil spills", yes, nobody is arguing otherwise, so what's your point?
“A specific event that can be attributed to the particular type of misinformation spread by FOX”
So really you are just saying this was caused by FOX.
You could have just said that.
In my view our political environment is much more complex than that and involves a pattern of escalations which can’t be so reductively disentangled.
I accept that you disagree with this.
When the NYT misrepresents something, for example, it contributes to the narrative of distortion just as much as when FOX openly claims there is distortion.
FOX news as far as I am aware has maintained that there is no evidence of election fraud, and called the election for Biden very early, so it’s not clear how you attribute this event to them. I don’t watch it, so I could be wrong about this, but it wouldn’t change the point.
The problem is not so easily attributable to a particular media outlet.
It seems like you have been misinformed or just made a faulty assumption. It just so happens that I am daily Fox News watcher and they have indeed been perpetuating the election fraud lies, they have walked it back after facing legal threats just like Newsmax and OAN, but they were still complicit in the lies.
Bias isn't that big of a problem, corruption and dishonesty is.
If all we had to deal with is bias in decision making which resulted in suboptimal outcome, things would still be okay, as long as people making decisions and in position of authority (which includes voters) are still honestly thinking that one strategy will yield the best outcome for all of society.
But as soon as people start being dishonest for self-interest reasons, they've subsumed the goal for their own, that's the real problem. I'd rather have someone in charge whose not the best at coming up with strategies and approaches that meet the goal, possibly due to their bias or other reasons, but is at least trying their best, then someone whose trying to manipulate support and slowly put goons they control in various positions so that they can just focus on their own self-interest and promotion while pretending to everyone that this is in our interest.
Unfortunately, you've fallen into the trap, friend. FOX may be to the right of MSNBC, but on a larger scale historically-informed left-right spectrum, the two are not actually that far apart ideologically. Most "conservative principles" these days are just the modern liberal status quo delayed by ~20 years; for example, anti-homosexual rhetoric is dead and dying on that side in a way that lines up well with what I remember from the Democrats in the late 90s.
The hyperpolarization is not to do with the right vs left dichotomy so much as it is a deliberate, encouraged-by-both-sides establishment of a false dichotomy designed to pen people into a small range of discourse. Some call this the Overton window; the deliberate establishment of contrasting narratives in a 2-pronged strategy was perfected in America by Arthur Finkelstein in the mid-20th century and is becoming an art form today.
If you can see FOX as a "right wing propaganda machine" but can't see the other MSM networks as being equally polarizing machines aimed at a different half of the audience, you're missing the shot.
The solution is to see the false dichotomy for what it is, look at who is pushing it, and look at what direction both "sides" actually push for. If you're on the right, they want you to have your attention and energy soaked up in this useless Stop the Steal push for Trump, who actually didn't accomplish any of the things his populist base asked for (immigration control, really bringing back American jobs, giving a shit about the working class). If you're on the Left, they want to soak you up with Biden instead of the more progressive policies that someone like Bernie or Tulsi Gabbard espoused. Either way, you're being played if you allow your energy to go toward supporting one of these useless figureheads instead of critiquing the system itself.
Right before the virus hit, unemployment was hitting record lows. (various unemployment records being about half a century old) The pay, adjusted for inflation, was starting to creep upward in a way that it hadn't for many years. If that isn't "really bringing back American jobs", how else would you judge it?
Apologies if I'm misrepresenting your point of view here; it sounds to me like you feel Trump was behind these improvements in the metrics.
What changes which he implemented do you feel where behind these improvements?
If I posited the idea that he was simply riding a wave of positive economic progress established under the Obama administration, how would you counter that?
You might be trying to be too smart for politics I'm afraid. Looking at real metrics? Trying to establish cause and effect? Having a good faith retrospective on prior policies? I'm not sure you'll find any of that in political discourse.
1. Regulations were severely cut. Those choke the life out of American business, making it uncompetitive. Maybe you like some of the regulations, but they have costs. Those costs aren't very visible to most people, because most people aren't trying to run a business, but they are huge.
2. Imports from less-regulated low-cost places like China were impacted by tariffs, favoring American workers. Retaliatory tariffs were largely unsuccessful.
Perhaps you are right on regulation but it is not clear that it has moved either of the metrics you mentioned. Looking at unemployment there is no deviation from the established trend during Trump's years in office.
I would counter that when looking at the causes of behavior in a highly dynamic system, you should look at more proximate causes, and ask you to enumerate the causes established by the Obama Administration you deem responsible for the positive upswing.
I'd furthermore question that anyone is very good at accurately assigning proximate causes for people doing what people do, but the more economically minded tend to get upset when you do that as they're rather fond of their equations.
To be fair, I said established under the Obama administration, not by the administration. In reality I think both were riding the wave following the 2008 collapse. As such we could probably point the finger at financial deregulation under George W Bush.
Yes, by many metrics things did look to be improving, but overall it's strongly true that Trump did not deliver what his populist base was looking for, and would not deliver it if given another four years. One thing that is telling in this regard is that the far dissident right, who were adamant supporters in 2016, have completely dropped support.
You've fallen for the trap of the 2d political spectrum. It isn't about bias, it is about intent. MSNBC, CNN, etc are capitalist enterprises biased towards revenue and clicks - it's in their DNA.
FOX was created explicitly by Ailes and Murdoch to prevent a second Nixon style teardown of the GOP. It's the reason Disney wanted absolutely nothing to do with the news arm when it acquired the rest of the Fox media empire - it's a capitalist enterprise only in the sense that it's profitable as a side effect of their main goal.
> You've fallen for the trap of the 2d political spectrum.
You mean the meme-graph one? Don't think so. Every time I take a quiz based on that it lands me near the center, yet I don't resonate with any self-proclaimed centrist I've talked to.
> FOX was created explicitly by Ailes and Murdoch to prevent a second Nixon style teardown of the GOP.
I don't think the intent decades ago particularly matters compared with their actions presently, which are as aimed (at the level of the individual Fox employee) towards revenue and clicks as anyone - just going after a different market niche than MSNBC et al. The ownership is going after propaganda and narrative control, of course; the whole point of what I am saying is that both sides are doing that.
> it's a capitalist enterprise only in the sense that it's profitable as a side effect of their main goal.
The fact that you can't see that that's true of the other side of the media is very telling. WaPo and friends lose money every year, but will never, ever be shut down. What could the reason for that be, other than to use it as a propaganda mouthpiece?
Honestly. If you can turn on an MSM network right now and not hear the propaganda baked into every sentence, you need to turn off all media, read some old books, disconnect for a few months, and come back when you have a perspective wide enough to realize that both sides are being harmed, and having their animosity aimed at one another, rather than at anyone who is actually doing the harm.
(This may be easier for me to see as a non-American, of course. I shouldn't blame someone who has been soaking in yank propaganda their whole lives for having difficulty taking off the blinders.)
A short trip to American where I was able to consume and notice the propaganda content of "both sides" of the media helped me realize the propaganda in my own. It's very difficult indeed to step outside the box.
I don't know that I'd associate it with the right wing, though. All parties are currently guilty of what you might call overfitting, where medium-term profits are directly measured against the content generating those profits, which understandably eventually segments the population and fits content to what keeps them engaged.
I just finished Lippmann’s 1922 classic Public Opinion. In it he argues that different people may draw completely different conclusions from the same facts due to three things:
1. Sampling. There’s a big universe of facts, and each media outlet reports on a tiny piece of this universe.
2. Stereotypes. When you read a news story, you unconsciously pattern match and associate it to related examples you have in your mind.
3. Context. When you read a news story, you subconsciously have some fascet of your own identity in mind (as a Republican, as a pro-choice person, etc.).
All three are in effect when stories are reported on and consumed. It’s a series of lenses that samples, then distorts, the truth in a way that given the same real-world event, different people may come to completely different conclusions about what happened.
I’d add a #4: fake news. This amplifies #1 significantly. It was less of a problem in Lippmann’s time since the News world was much smaller. He might have called this “rumor”, not news.
> #4: fake news. This amplifies #1 significantly. It was less of a problem in Lippmann’s time since the News world was much smaller. He might have called this “rumor”, not news.
He called it propaganda and it was a big problem during his time.
> Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. For while people who have direct access can misconceive what they see, no one else can decide how they shall misconceive it, unless he can decide where they shall look, and at what. The military censorship is the simplest form of barrier, but by no means the most important, because it is known to exist, and is therefore in certain measure agreed to and discounted.
IMO we got here because social media allows people to run from one form of censorship straight into the arms of another without realizing they're still being censored. The same thing happened in Lippmann's time. People did not realize their circles were excluding information. The result was a couple periods of very-difficult-to-reconcile division.
Reminds me of Jaynes point that IIRC the beliefs of two perfectly rational agents with very different Bayesian priors can diverge even if they are presented with exactly the same facts/information/data...
Good timing! I've just finished Le Bon and Bernays.
> people may draw completely different conclusions from the same facts
Le Bon points out a more basic issue. He wrote about the kinds of crowds who used to storm the Bastille and so on—and appear to have returned to American history today after a long vacation. He concluded that the members of such crowds simply don't do things like considering facts or drawing conclusions. Instead, they associate chains of images and follow suggestions from prestigious leaders. TV advertisments do exactly what he suggested, and so does Donald Trump. It appears to work.
This puts me in a dilemma. As a physicist with egalitarian tendencies, I want everyone to take action that will provide the things they want and need, according to valid arguments founded on the laws of nature. But apparently, one of those laws of nature says that valid reasons have nothing in common with the reasons people do things.
Bernays resolved that dilemma by telling people like me to manipulate everyone else into doing what (we believe) is in their best interest. I'm really uncomfortable with that position, but it's hard to see an alternative.
> For voters, improve their ability to make the right choice via education and representative (not direct) democracy
The common theme of Le Bon and Bernays was that such groups as "the voters" are inherently not capable of making deliberate choices, and those choices will be made for them by propagandists. I find that depressing, but their arguments for it are convincing.
> The common theme of Le Bon and Bernays was that such groups as "the voters" are inherently not capable of making deliberate choices, and those choices will be made for them by propagandists. I find that depressing, but their arguments for it are convincing.
It wasn't always the case that "fake news" aka propaganda made so much headway. The degree to which that was happening from ~2015 until now is a unique phenomenon not paralleled since Lippmann's time.
1) On web sites like this I've noticed a rule "Assume good faith". But in real life there are lots of people who say things in bad faith. In the case of PR people and trial lawyers and partisan politicians it seems to be in the job description to say things in bad faith. I have no solutions on how to fix this- I don't believe in God but I can imagine a deity punishing people who choose to exercise their free speech to profit on bad faith lies- but I have no theory of government to stop this behavior on earth.
2) We have a society based around money. People in this site like to whine about what Zuckerberg or whomever is doing but the guiding principle of society seems to be "he who has the money makes the rules". So if Zukerberg wants to weaponize Facebook against society the full power of the financial system will help him do it as long as he has the money/ property to control Facebook. I think in theory we could transition to a society where CEO and board members have their shares and/ or control of companies confiscated if they act in ways which harms society. (Perhaps putting things to a vote, i.e. a universal ballet: should Zuckerberg have his shares of Facebook seized and auctioned off under the theory he is harming society y/n)). Since this has never been tried as far as I know I don't know if my solution could even work.
Hard agree on 1. Don't have an answer other than "superhuman AI ruling humanity", but that is not fun, because at that point we stop being the protagonists of our own story.
About 2:
> Since this has never been tried as far as I know I don't know if my solution could even work.
This was tried, during various revolutions that included the phase of killing the rich people and collectivizing their wealth. I worry your suggestion here would end up being used the same way - with prominent CEOs getting their companies auctioned from under them by angry mobs.
I'm talking about confiscating property in a banal, rule based democracy sort of way, not by mobs.
Humans seem to be wired via evolution to tolerate being controlled by higher status humans otherwise I'd expect confiscation of property to be a popular proposition in a world where high status people own the majority of property and wealth inequality keeps increasing.
We'd have more discussions about where institutiins are serving us well and less about "those poor CEOs, think of their feelings" if we weren't seemingly wired to care about high status people's desires more than our own needs.
> I'm talking about confiscating property in a banal, rule based democracy sort of way, not by mobs.
Banal, rules-based democracies still need a fundamental set of rights if they're to avoid instantly devolving to mob rule. I really don't want a rules-based democracy voting to kill me and my family, so I'm glad that I have the fundamental right not to be subject to that risk (even if it were supported by the majority.)
One of the values that's pretty prevalent in the United States and a lot of other developed nations is a respect for property rights; if you worked for something, you get to keep it, even if other people would want it more.
Both of these rights exist on a spectrum (e.g. the death penalty can override your right to life in the extreme case, and taxes can override your right to your property to a small extent), but by almost any measure putting your right to property to a vote is extremely far on the "not respecting property rights" side of the spectrum.
Also, I have extremely little confidence that the best way to assuage our political divide is to introduce the perpetual threat of "the majority had better think that what you're doing is useful, otherwise we'll take everything you have."
The rule of law means that sometimes things will arise that slip through the cracks in unintended ways. The solution to this is to fix those cracks and make the law more clearly define what's desired. If this makes a given business model non-viable, then so be it; that's the price of progress. I'd imagine that those is favor of the rule of law, though, can see the slippery slope of letting the mob vote on what do with the property of those who were following the law at the time.
The Communist Party of China follows the rules of the government they controlled perfectly well -- and have no problem winning elections. If you actually want property rights to be up for popular vote, it's important to understand that removal of property is going to be backed by the threat of violence by the state (which will occasionally need to be enacted). You will have companies removed for reasons that are "against the public interest" where you disagree with the actual actions.
China isn't a rights based democracy so that's neither here nor there.
Sure, hypothetically if Mark Zuckerberg refuses to leave the Facebook building after being evicted of his Facebook ownership he could be physically removed by the police.
Why this deserves our sympathy more than a sixteen year old physically arrested for smoking weed is not obvious- or even a tenant physically evicted for being unable to pay rent. Arresting people for drug crimes is treated as normal state violence and happily supported by Americans- but it seems people have evolved to sympathize with a high status billionaire over some kid commiting a victimless crime.
The thing that makes a rights-based democracy "rights-based" is the idea that there are certain lines that are so important to individual liberty that society at large has chosen to not interfere with them. Traditionally, one of these rights is the right to private capital. It's the oldest right recorded in English common law. Giving up this right, even if it's purported to be in the interests of society at large, will remove part of the "rights-based" part of the rights-based democracy above. It's not something that should be done lightly. Civil forfeiture is rife for abuse, even in its current form.
I agree there should be a right to private capital- to an extent.
But the fact you think a right to obtain billions of dollars and control the labor of 10 of thousands of workers is a fundemental right- when housing for the poor isn't- I think again goes to my point we've evolved to care more about high status rulers than ourselves. (I mean that literally, tribal humans or proto-humans murdered or outcompeted with less tribal humans at the whims of their tribal leaders and we are the result.)
Anyway I am under no illusions that we are going to have a change in policy and stop caring about aristocrat's feeling more than our own well-being (Donald Trump is sad, let's storm some buildings you guys. Jeff Bezos treats warehouse workers bad- but he needs to be able to do that cause it would hurt his feelings if the workers ran the company instead.) So there's no reason to debate it other than intellectual fun.
I followed a train of thought recently that's somewhat related to this. It appears to me the one branch of government that has stood up reasonably well recently is the court system. Courts require a standard of evidence, and while it's clear that justices will try to interpret things as favorable to their partisan beliefs, for the most part they are not willing to simply accept alternate realities. Some people were worried that Trump's lawsuits would find friendly judges despite the lack of evidence, and that overwhelmingly didn't happen.
So that got me wondering, ironically given your listing of lawyers as one of the named bad-faith groups, could government be made to act more like the legal system, or could the legal system be incorporated more into government. One specific idea I was considering was whether you could have the option of a defamation-style judicial review of statements of fact made by elected officials. Obviously you wouldn't litigate every statement, but what if there were some sort of challenge process - perhaps with a fee to bring a challenge, and/or consequences for spurious challenges, so they wouldn't become overwhelming - by which the opposition could challenge any public statement of fact by an elected official? Critically this challenge would be brought in a court of law, with all of the professional standards and requirements that entails. (As opposed to being litigated by politicians, like an impeachment proceeding.) It wouldn't be a criminal proceeding, and there wouldn't be criminal consequences. Probably the result would simply be made public, and maybe the losing side would need to pay the costs of the winning side. Of course they would also have had the opportunity to retract and correct the untrue statement at the outset.
As things stand, the president and his supporters are able to say whatever BS they want publicly, then they go to court with these lawsuits, and they say different things, because there are actual consequences there. Perhaps if there were consequences for any knowing lie by an elected official, you'd see fewer of them? The idea wouldn't be to use this for everything, just for clear, baseless statements of fact with reprocussions. And it's not like truth is unknowable; we already have this kind of litigation around defamation, and it largely works.
Anyway, not like I see anything like this happening, but if I were designing a system of government it's something I'd want to consider. (I suppose there's also the chance of it backfiring, simply politicizing the judiciary by involving it more in politics. But again, the responses to the election lawsuits give me some hope there.)
It appears to me the one branch of government that has stood up reasonably well recently is the court system.
One of the most serious things the court system does is deprive people of their liberty and life. And it is not stellar. You may argue that the 2% to 10% wrongful conviction rate is good (I think it is unacceptable) but what does seem clear is that many judges are swayed by any old pseudo-scientific rubbish (if they even remain awake during the trial): https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-grisham-wrongful...
I like the idea of people being held accountable for mis-information though.
I definitely wouldn't argue that the court system is perfect, just that it appears to be better at separating fact from fiction than other branches of government (though, again, not perfect).
I'm sure in this very long thread some folks believe that those items you list are symptoms of the problem and that the root causes are much more simple. That huge chunk (I'd estimate it at well into the tens of millions of US adults) feels disenfranchised (right now they literally feel that in way in that they believe their vote doesn't count, but also figuratively) because opportunity has been "taken" from them. Taken is in quotes because though it's partially true it's also a victim mentality.
The rioters/protesters are largely white as opposed to the more-diverse BLM protesters (more on that later). These people feel like the US Government, in general, and that includes moderate republicans, has failed them in the past several decades by sending their jobs overseas, or by allowing immigrants into the country who have taken their jobs. They feel like they're being left behind, which, in truth, they are. Blue collar jobs have been exported, en masse, over the years, and that's been a bi-partisan effort resulting in lifting countless people out of poverty outside the US, but putting incredible pressure on people inside of the US, particularly the middle class, who feel like they have few or no prospects.
And of course the irony here, when compared to the BLM protests, is that if a sizable segment of these rioters/protesters weren't racist they would understand that this is how Black American have felt _for a couple of hundred years_. Important note: this is not to say that these rioters/protesters are even close to being as poorly treated as the black community. Outsourcing their jobs and giving their former wages to owners/capital in the form of profits is SO FAR from the historical treatment of black Americans that someone will read this and consider it laughable to even compare the two. But they are getting a taste of what it's like when the government stops working for them, the formerly very privileged (not relative to the 1% but certainly to black americans) white middle class.
All of the polarization stems from that. "You've taken my opportunity and everyone else seems to be getting theirs and I no longer have mine. Fuck you. I'm going to break shit until you listen up."
The loss of jobs and transfer of production abroad was driven by the widespread introduction of MBA degrees and consequent recognition of how offshoring could increase profits plus simple capitalistic greed. All politically implemented by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the greediest and most powerful of the capitalistic organizations in the USA.
Now, with Dems in control, USCoC is back in the driver's seat:
If you had written your entire comment without the "No" at the beginning I would be nodding my head in agreement with you. Instead I'll ask: do you think the "MBAs" operated/operate in a vacuum devoid of government oversight/regulation or do you think they were/are aided and abetted by said overseers/regulators?
Maybe they were storming the capitol because they thought the ghost of Jack Welch was in there.
Great analysis, although I think it's important to understand all the outsourcing of blue collar jobs and manufacturing was mostly driven by consumer demand for low prices. It's still true today. Most people can pay 2x as much for something made in the USA, but choose not to.
Good point, but I'd adjust your "mostly" to "also" because the profit motivation, I suspect, came first. And at some number the 2x is probably not true (like paying $600 vs $1200 for a fridge is a pretty huge ask for a lot of folks).
That said, I would agree most people could afford it today if we'd kept some of that exported wealth stateside, or if we'd spread the wealth that did remain stateside out more evenly over the past 40 years instead of our policies benefiting those with capital so disproportionately.
> The rioters/protesters are largely white as opposed to the more-diverse BLM protesters (more on that later)
> And of course the irony here, when compared to the BLM protests, is that if a sizable segment of these rioters/protesters weren't racist they would understand that this is how Black American have felt _for a couple of hundred years_.
Why is what people look like so important to you? It sounds as if you are saying that if a group of thousands of black Trump supporters did exactly the same thing, it would be ok. And that the BLM rioters over the summer were somehow more acceptable because they were more diverse.
How is that not pre-judging people by how they look?
Whenever I ask people this, they essentially tell me that while they can't know exactly what an individual is like by their skin color, they can use skin color as a proxy for other characteristics, and make inferences about how that person has been treated in life by how they look.
So in a roundabout way, yes, they are making unjustified pre-judgements based on people's skin color.
Is this really ok?
You can see interviews with David Duke where he clarifies that he doesn't hate every black person, he just assumes that black people in general are not compatible with our society, but that there are individual exceptions to this. Klansmen will tell you in interviews that they don't hate black people purely because of how they look, but how they act, and that they are using their skin color to infer how they will act.
Height is a visible characteristic that is strongly correlated with success in life, do you use that to judge people as well?
The truth is that purely through numerical probability you can make pre-judgements about people based on their appearance. I for one however go out of my way not to. That doesn't mean that I am blinding myself to people's physical characteristics or trying to erase them of course. It merely means that I won't condemn or excuse people's actions because of how they look.
Lincoln lived most of his life as a Whig but aligned with the new Republican Party in the 1850s during a transitional era in American politics. Northern opinion was turning against slavery, and enslaved people’s efforts to resist and escape bondage kept the issue center stage.
Rather than accede to the changing political landscape, Southern Democrats maligned the new Republican Party as an existential threat because it opposed the expansion of slavery in the Western territories. Promoters of secession, called “fire-eaters,” knew they did not command majority support even within the South, so they deployed a rhetoric of fear and anger that condemned Republicans as “fanatics” and encouraged fellow Southerners to regard Lincoln’s election as “an open declaration of war” upon the region.
This hyperbolic language left no room for compromise or middle ground; it was intended to terrify voters into opposing Lincoln. The result was that Lincoln was not listed as a candidate in many Southern precincts, and his election, thus, surprised even moderate Southerners who believed he could not command an electoral college majority. By perverting the electoral process, fire-eaters swayed moderates to adopt their conspiratorial approach to politics.
Lincoln believed in the protection of minority rights, but he also believed in majority rule. Secession was, in his words, an appeal from the “ballot to the bullet.” That is, because Southern Democrats could not persuade a majority of voters to their standard (as they had for decades), they abandoned the political process altogether. This action, Lincoln felt, made self-government impossible. If the losing side in an election could always walk away, how could a nation ever remain intact?
It somehow reminds me of Weimar Germany, with two very fringe (sometimes militant) opposing groups radicalising the rest of the society -- or the rest just ignoring the whole mess and going about their lives.
According to the history of Weimar Germany, this seems nothing like that, though. They enforced their views with guns. We reinforce our views with protests. Yes, there are some crazy folks with guns, but that's different than the politicians themselves having a personal military that they use to purge opponents.
However, I'd love a deep historical perspective – it would be fascinating if there were parallels to be drawn. But, are there any?
The historical comparison is not that great. About half of the American population is not unemployed and at the risk of starving. Most of the production of food and resources is not being sent to nearby countries in the form of payments for a lost war. There is no hyperinflation that is causing a massive drop in living standards.
In the Weimar Republic, KPD and NSDAP parties representation in the Bundestag, as distinct parties with relatively large representations.
In 1932, the KPD had 360k members, 5m+ votes, and 14-17% of the electorate. From 1928, the KPD was basically the Stalin party. They believed that the SPD (most analogous to modern-day "Democrats" in USA) were fascist, let alone the NSDAP.
There is no modern equivalent to the KPD in contemporary American politics. The most left-leaning elected officials in the Bundestag-equivalent would have been SPD members. The fringe militant people on the left in the USA do not have any political representation at the federal level, mostly because they do not exist in meaningful numbers, certainly not anywhere approaching 10-17%.
I think that 10-17% might exist on the right (it is probably closer to 5%), but especially after this year, it will become clear that the Republican Party (more analogous to the CDU, historically) is not their party.
If history is cyclical, Trump will form his equivalent of the DNVP shortly, which will not be radical enough for the people storming the Capitol today. This election and transfer of power might be the American Dolchstoß moment, in retrospect. I really hope we've learned.
Who are the two fringe groups? By citing Weimar Germany, and then going into "two fringe groups", you are putting Anti-Nazi organizations on the same moral level as Nazis. You do see the problem with that right?
The left he/she is referring were not anti-nazi, they were pro-communist, and almost uniformly pro-soviet groups that argued that the ruling social democratic government had betrayed the working class.
The Nazis weren't the nice guys, but neither were their opposition, at least not the one referred to by the parent.
Yup. Remember during the rise of Hitler, he was able to consolidate power because the CENTRIST government at the time agreed to work with Hitler to achieve short-term political objectives.
Well, now... To be fair the Weimar Republic was a political turmoil. It is not like the Nazis had "gas the Jews" in their party programme. They established themselves over 10 years, and due to the instability f any political coalition in the government they were able to maneuver themselves into a position where they could force events forward.
People seem to think the Nazi party showed up on the stairs of the parliament demanding genocide and war. In reality it was a 14 year progression of bad options, political turmoil and very hard choices to defend extremely weak coalitions. Were those choices good? Obviously not. Can we judge them after the fact? I would say no.
Maybe it wasn't in the party program, but everyone knew what SA violence meant and Hitler had been pretty explicit about his views of the racial supremacy of the Germans and what he thought should be done to the Jews in particular as far back as Mein Kampf.
Maybe if the NSDAP had campaigned with "we want to gas all the Jews" they wouldn't have won so many votes, but nobody can say that NSDAP voters could have been ignorant of the general tendency. In fact, I think this kind of "we couldn't have known what would happen" is IMHO revisionism.
The truth is that, while everything about economic depression, the political instability of the system, the KPD and SPD being unable to cooperate, etc., were important factors, it remains true that a large segment of the German population were totally OK with ideas of German imperialism, revanchism and anti-semitism, otherwise Hitler's rise to power would never had happened.
I completely agree. What I wanted to convey was that I do not think the events leading up to Hitler becoming Kansler can be easily summarised.
The simplified story of the nazi rise to rule removes one of the most important lessons that can be learned from it: the watchfulness required to protect democracy.
We don't need to watch out for the big step because those will be easily.spotted anyway, but for the many, many small ones.
The two fringe groups were not Nazis and anti-nazis. They were Nazis and communists. The communists had their own agenda, they were not simply anti-nazi.
There was also a large group of more centrist liberals that were more focused on stuff like trade unions and public sector unions. Hitler realized he could work with this group as long as he agreed to meet their short-term political goals.
And to your point, the KPD, along with their militant wing Antifaschistische Aktion, attacked the SPD far more aggressively than they attacked the Nazis.
When both extremes are saying that the other side should face death or life imprisonment as well as anyone that defends that extremist, what those groups actually stand for becomes irrelevant.
> How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality
This isn't an accurate representation of the US.
There are 4 sides:
- extreme left
- left
- right
- extreme right
The proportion of each is probably around: 5%/45%/45%/5% (maybe 10/40/40/10)
The 5% on each extreme are the one making the news on the other side to instill fear from the "other side" (fox news depiction of far left Portland, cnn depiction of far right, etc)
Since media get money from more viewers, and since fear sells, unfortunately they have no incentive to make this better. Finding neutral sources while staying informed is a hard problem.
Yup. Taking a complex, multidimensional space of ideas and beliefs (and by multidimensional I mean something like 100+ dimensions, not 3 or 4) and projecting it into a number line is one of the things that bewilder me about the world the most. Doubly so in countries that don't have a two-party system like the US.
And if anything, I think that this classical projected political spectrum isn't a line, it's really a circle. Extreme left and extreme right are the same thing; the particulars of the beliefs don't matter (if you think they do, you can always imagine this being a flat strip of paper glued into a Möbius strip).
> And if anything, I think that this classical projected political spectrum isn't a line, it's really a circle. Extreme left and extreme right are the same thing; the particulars of the beliefs don't matter (if you think they do, you can always imagine this being a flat strip of paper glued into a Möbius strip).
It's not just you - this is named "Horseshoe Theory".
I suggest you check out the political compass. It’s a reliable indicator of political pref over time. We used it a lot in my public policy grad program
The idea of left and right comes from having a 2 party system. Politics is not a line. There are n dimensions, where n is the number of issues you care about that have a non-muddled for-against aspect (if the issue is too muddled, it is probably 2 separate issues in this model)
> Supporters of President Trump have stormed the US Capitol to protest lawmakers certifying Joe Biden’s election victory. Based on what you have read or heard about this, do you support or oppose these actions?
45% of Republicans said yes! Now I am not asserting that half of republicans are about to engage in sedition. But is it because they have different beliefs? No, instead I think it’s just that the 5% you describe has nothing to lose.
If it were limited to "protest" I would support their actions too, no matter how much I disagree with their motives. Everyone has a right to expression. Where the actions are clearly unsupportable is that "stormed" was rather more literal than I suspect some of those 45% realized.
Also, is it possible there's a sampling bias in poll respondents? I almost never respond to polls myself because they often seem to be designed to be polarizing.
I disagree, left-right isn't sufficient enough to capture the peculiarities of current US politics.
it's more along these three camps:
- Progressives / Left Populists (such as Bernie, AOC, etc...) - they aren't really "extreme left"; they are more moderate lib-left if you ask any Europeans. They don't really want to demolish capitalism as some actual Marxists suggest, they just want to fix/modulate capitalism to be reasonable to the ordinary people, at the expense of large corporations and free market policies. Although some of them are in the Democratic Party, they are still failing to exert any power in there, which is mostly comprised of neoliberals. However, they are gaining an noticeable amount of partisan support these days, up to the point that the neoliberals had to actually strategize a bit to make sure Bernie doesn't win in the DNC primaries.
- Neoliberals / Globalists (Obama, Biden, etc...) - this is where the majority of politicians are at, comprising the majority of the Democratic Party, as well as about half of the Republican Party (or even more). Although it seems on the surface that the Dems and Reps are fighting the shit out of each other, many of them are still bind by the common interest of supporting various austerity policies, free reign of large corporations and making sure the global free market economy continue without any problems. Note that the left tends to use the term "neoliberal" more, while the right tends to use the term "globalists" more. From the left and right populist's view they are the source of all evil, and from a neoliberal's view the populist left/right are respectively "communists" and "fascists".
- Right Populists / Nationalists (Trump, etc...) - Just like the progressives hate that the neoliberals are looting people with austerity measures and skyrocketing housing/healthcare/education costs, the right populists hate that the globalists are looting people by shutting down former industrial businesses, and imposing some weird liberal cultural hegemony upon them. Though I do not completely know the dynamics inside that camp, there seems to be a common agenda of being oppositional to immigration and being pro local business, as well as a deep hatred of liberal media. They have started to take over the GOP party, which is why there are no-Trump Republicans fighting against it.
Trump is kind of an outlier - he was a real-estate neoliberal but was kind of an outcast among them, and he forced his way into politics with many years of reality TV image-shaping. Many on the far-left criticize him being a neoliberal in right populist coating, and some on the far-right are disappointed by Trump about him having achieved nothing (which is a different phenomenon than no-Trump Republicans - I'm talking about actual fascists here!)
There are also some on the left (state communists, anarchists) as well as the far-right (fascists, neoreactionaries) which I've excluded, as they are still a bit fringe.
It also seems that the right often oversimplifies the left as well as the left oversimplifies the right, and that's partially because there are power struggles inside both of the respective camps that makes the whole situation a bit complicated. For example, if you picked a random BLM protester, chances are you'll get a neoliberal (if their protest was co-opted by the establishment Democrats), a progressive (if their protest wasn't co-opted but are still mainly peaceful and still believe in electorialism), or an anarchist (if they do not believe in electorialism and are more interested in looting and smashing the police). A naive right-populist will see protesters destroying police stations and say that the Democrats are letting this happen and the left are all "cultural Marxists", but in reality it's a situation where anarchists are on the rise and the neoliberals are failing to take control over the "peaceful/orderly protest" narrative. Actually, I don't really know if the protestors participating in the violence are simply "anarchists", maybe they are just uninterested in these labels and just want to wreck shit up as they are fed up by many decades of police suppression.
Now you see what Trump is talking about when he says fake news. The irony is that fake news is basically both sides of the spectrum. I'm personally on the right-wing side of politics and it just cringes me at how many people on the right-wing buy into baseless conspiracy theories. I always tell people that fighting over a mask is not exactly the hill you want to die on. However, I've also noticed that the left-wing is getting their own share of conspiracy theories as well now too.
> How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality?
My own impression is that this is far worse in the US than in most other first world countries. If I'm right about that, then explanations based on social media algorithms etc don't really work, because the same algorithms apply in other countries too. It really then needs a US-specific explanation.
Maybe, the US has just got too big and too diverse – I am talking here about political/ideological/worldview diversity, not ethnic/racial/etc diversity – to hold itself together in the long-run. Countries don't last forever, and the US isn't going to last forever either. Of course, it isn't breaking up this year, and I think other countries are likely to break up before the US does (such as the UK, Spain, Belgium, Canada). But maybe these current events are bringing that eventuality closer to us.
I agree that it is far worse in the US than in other Western Democracies. I think it has to do with the fundamental US culture of distrust in government and extreme focus on “individualism”. Which by many people gets translated into “I don’t care about the rest as long as I get what I want”. It is an attitude that long term undermines and destroy society. The US is moving towards a modern version of feudalism. It will get much worse. You haven’t seen anything yet.
The US has a uniquely strong distrust in government compared to other nations to which you are referring. I think as a result, the social media algorithms are particularly potent in the US.
Anyone who is a student of history should have a uniquely strong distrust of the government. I find that it’s the folks with the weakest familiarity of the history of governments abusing its citizens that have the greatest faith in more and bigger government, especially distant government (i.e. federal government)
Not to say that you’re wrong but the algorithm takes into account location. A user in the US is going to see a different feed than a user in France. I think it is largely the algorithm and the narratives being pushed by news sources creating the divide. There is a history of trust in newscasters that is being taken advantage of to spread propaganda and it works.
The US might be too big. I want to agree, but I know I’m biased by the media. I want to disagree, but I haven’t traveled to enough of the country to say it confidently.
I doubt that because arguably these problems are significantly worse in the US than in other first world English speaking countries (Anglophone Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand)
I think that one facet is implied by Dang's post above ... if we're not careful to have a respectful debate, then we'll end up having a shouting match instead.
I used to appreciate grid-lock in DC under the idea that the less they got done, the less they'd do to me. Now I recognize that the best outcomes are a) when the lawmakers reach across the aisle and forge what both sides would consider a compromise and more importantly b) when the lawmakers we elect actually enact laws and run the country in a way that benefits the people they represent.
I suspect that our best way forward as a nation is to resume carefully growing the middle class. This will by nature mean that the financial elites (some of whom are clearly moral despots) will lose a small portion of their wealth. But it's amazingly analogous to the reforms at the beginning of the last century that started to protect labor from the robber barons.
I think the second step is to (yes, at a cost) restore at least some manufacturing capability to the US. This provides jobs to many who are NOT going to be talking tech on HN and also protects us (and the world) against there being potentially a single-source supplier of any given resource.
This is misguided. Respectful debate in general is good, but only when both sides act in good faith. When some act in bad faith, telling outright lies while maintaining a veneer of civility, then you don't have obvious conflict but arguably something worse: corruption. There is some research showing that angry exchanges are in fact helpful in maintaining the integrity of an online community when others are trying to subvert it: https://snap.stanford.edu/conflict/
It was my analysis of "How did we get here" posted by the parent ... I thought it was still relevant to the OP but perhaps not something that anyone is interested in discussing.
I know it’s cliche to blame the internet, but ... the internet is a big factor. Previously, there were only a handful of big media outlets that everyone read/watched, they kept decently to journalistic integrity principles, and made some effort to be balanced and not overly biased. No OANN or Newsmax there. But the internet allowed anyone to be a “journalist”, and as fringe media started to gain in popularity, mainstream media started getting more polarized too, to keep market share.
Going back further, before the existence of mass media, everything was more in-person/local. When you have a small community of people you talk to in-person, you’re going to be way more reasonable than on some global, anonymous, online community. Social media is a great example - it’s a breeding ground for arguments, conspiracy theories and extremism. People who would be perfectly civil to each other in person can be absolute assholes to each other online. How many email/Slack disagreements have you been in at work that instantly resolve the moment you move to in-person or video chat?
Some will say this polarization always existed, but I do feel it has gotten significantly worse. I don’t remember the 90s feeling this polarized, with people so unable to agree upon basic facts about current events. And I’m guessing the 90s were more polarized than the 50s.
One good thing - hostilities BETWEEN nations seem to be decreasing. I don’t think we’re on the cusp of World War 3 or any such thing, but hostilities WITHIN nations seem to be on the rise, at least from my “gut feel” view of my life so far.
On that note, life has been good for a long time in the west. War is an absolute atrocity, but it does put petty disputes into perspective, and build some sense of national unity. Since World War 2, life has been pretty cushy and safe in western democracies, so maybe we’re starting to make enemies of each other to fill the void?
I started watching news from overseas as they seem to be more objective and professional.
Both sides have "news" outlets which are agenda based and profit motivated. And truth doesn't usually sell as well. That's a problem. You can't even trust the fact checker sources as they say "out of context" or "partially true" when it's a fact against their agenda/team. Even the fact checking sites are super biased.
If you align with a side, you attach your identity to it like Paul Graham wrote about with Keep Your Identity Small [1]. People don't like their identity criticized, or want to believe they may be wrong, so they believe what they want and create their own distorted bubble.
My buddy always said "we're told to not talk about religion or politics. Probably the 2 most powerful and influential topics that exist". Now people have started talking about them, but not in a productive fashion.
If you believe someone on the other side is bad based on their views, you can't have a dialogue. This is the greatest tragedy. Disowning family members and friends over their views because you concluded they must be bad people?
Very few people on either side are actually bad. They just have a different experience, they've aligned their identity and team, and there's a ton of forces at play (ex: media, special interests, etc) to keep that divisiveness going.
>Both sides have "news" outlets which are agenda based and profit motivated. And truth doesn't usually sell as well.
The problem with the both sides argument is that one side is disproportionately loose with the truth and constantly resorting to not just half-truths, but complete fabrications.
Without good faith there will be no useful dialogue.
The left side is loose with the truth too. They suppress newsworthy stories or do no reporting on things that are against their agenda. Selective reporting is loose with the truth as well.
So maybe one side fabricates more and one side withholds more. Two ways to be scandalous. They are both profit driven and aren't truthful any way you slice it. They are not trustworthy with news and cannot be relied upon to be objective. Even the shows positioned as news are super biased and full of opinions.
I understand they are entitled to have opinionated segments with personalities. That's fine.
But we have regulations around what is Champagne or Bourbon. And you need a license to cut hair. Maybe anything dubbed "news" should have a standard?
This is the answer, I don't have the source in front of me but I remember reading some surveys about American trust in institutions circa 2015 and people who identified as Republican trusted "Media" at a rate of 8%. I can't imagine that number particularly improved since then.
"The left" has been storming Portland, Seattle and many other places instead, for most of 2020, based on the notion that America is filled with white supremacists and the police are systemically racist. Or put another way, because they theorise that white police are involved in an enormous, coast-to-coast conspiracy against black people.
Whether you agree with that belief or not (there was one forlorn WSJ article at the start of all that showing that the data doesn't support it), it is objectively a conspiracy theory in the sense that it posits a conspiracy. And it has led to people repeatedly storming and smashing up not only federal buildings but many others.
> Or put another way, because they theorise that white police are involved in an enormous, coast-to-coast conspiracy against black people
That is a blatant straw-man. The U.S. has a violent, racist history - particularly it's police force. There is no reason a continuation of violence and racism would require a conspiracy.
There are some good data analyses showing that the US police isn't racist. The belief that it is gets repeated so much, and journalists are so loathe to investigate it, that the claims come to define reality. But it's not actually true.
To add to this, lies with easily proven evidence if they wanted to investigate. Eg. Check report on something from a hearing or court document, checked the hearing or the court document itself and it's completely opposite to what the media is reporting.
Not everyone knows how to check public records. I just signed up for PACER this year, and I'm still trying to work out how to access State and local court system's records since they're so distributed.
Like it or not, we haven't exactly done a great job at exposing primary sources to everyone. Until that can happen, media outlets who pay for boots on the ground will still have a degree of intutively granted credibility. Once everyone knows how to access it at will (and can be bothered to) we may see some better measurement on the reliabilitt of information sources.
Sadly I tend to believe that a very small minority of people will ever bother to access the documents, the rest will just believe whatever the media will tell them.
I just got to the point this year where I finally got fed up with the level of editorial discretion taken with so many hot news takes. Makes me a real stick in the mud because I'm just not comfortable not seeing the primary doc anymore. I want to know what actually happened, not what someone thinks I should know about what happened.
Agreed. Anyone who studied any subject deeply should recognize the concept of Gell-Mann Amnesia; I think anyone who tried to verify anything outside of their domain will quickly confirm that this phenomenon is, in fact, very true.
No. People chose their own truth because they didn't like what the media was saying even though it is much closer to reality than whatever crap they were fed through "alternative" media.
I'll posit an additional factor: people who are disenfranchised and desperate are more likely to believe conspiracy theories and act on them. Andrew Yang talked about this a lot during + after his campaign, and also this paper:
I don't think that's true. Trump's base is rural and suburban, white, non-college educated [1]. While income isn't listed here, that does not align with typical wealth distributions.
All goes back to Reagan's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine which gave rise to biased political based news coverage a la Fox News. Since then, political polarization has increased each year until we got to the point we're at where both sides see the other as dangerous and lacking legitimacy. It's a lose-lose downward spiral.
The Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcast media. I guess if it still existed it could be amended to include cable but that would be a tough thing to do since cable companies don't lease the public airwaves.
Prior to around ~1990s Fox News (and ABC/CBS) were the mainstream. CNN was a tiny backwater news station that didn't grow to popularity until the 1991 gulf war in which they had by far the best reporting and everyone else was re-broadcasting CNN. CNN is what grew out of the repeal of the fairness doctrine.
Spoken by someone who clearly has not read the Powell Memorandum. Reagan was just following the playbook. It's all right there, out in the open. It goes like clockwork because the real backer for both sides -- mega-corporatism -- wants it. The "culture war" conflicts are considered unimportant, as they have no effect at all on the substance.
Trump is the first on his side to step out of line. It will cost them, but maybe not much. The goal now will be to get people distracted again, so the real work of eliminating people's influence may proceed.
> All goes back to Reagan's repeal of the Fairness Doctrine
Reagan himself was an FBI informant and was involved with blacklisting so-called Communists way back when he was President of the Screen Actors Guild, during the McCarthy era. So any story that says "It all started on such and such a date" is completely arbitrary.
You can talk about Barry Goldwater. The National Review. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. There was already a strong conservative movement growing that got Reagan elected in the first place. Not to mention the October surprise conspiracy theory of his 1980 election.
The 1960s, the Vietnam War, the civil rights era, these had a huge impact socially, started political realignments, and caused much internal turmoil in the United States.
The Gingrich "Republican Revolution" occurred in 1994. Hillary Clinton claimed there was a vast right-wing conspiracy in 1995. Government shutdowns. Impeachment. Oklahoma City bombing. All of this occurred before Fox News even went on the air.
Will anyone acknowledge that Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were radicalized before Fox News existed, not to mention before Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube?
Yes, but because the radio used public airways, the courts found that the FCC can regulate them. It’s why you can’t swear on the radio (the FCC says so) despite free speech allowing swearing.
I'd be curious on how this philosophy translates to the internet today. There's lots of public infrastructure that we use, but it's hard to picture surfing the internet or watching Netflix as the same as broadcast television.
So, if the government had nationalized all paper products in the US, and then put strict content standards on newspapers, would the courts (and you) be like, "oh, well, that's not really a violation of the First Amendment, because the public owns the papers"?
It starts with the deregulation of cable news in the 1990s, and creation of mainstream media networks like Fox and CNN. The explosive use of the internet and later social media in the mid to late 2000s only amplified an existing problem of polarization.
Its happening everywhere, in every political arena. I'm hearing very similar things happening in other countries as well. The hilarious part is every political side believing they are the only ones with facts. It sort of reminds me of how civilizations collapse - esp. the 'barbarians' overpowering 'civilized' Europe. All current mainstream political parties have these barbarians within them. They don't all take violent forms, but they infect people with memes and thoughts that go counter to facts and logic. In general though, I think its the slow decline of hard news with a corresponding amplification of emotional porn/entertainment/opinion/drama. The massive amount of noise that is generated makes it hard to find the signal, and social media isn't helping because they make money when "news" is more entertainment/drama than boring facts. In short, we're f?ked, and we're going to say f?ked for a while.
Single member districts coupled with todays media and social media.
This naturally leads to the natural balance being two parties, which has to oppose each other to the extreme in all topics, which then diverges further and further creating the US today.
Different variants of multi member districts or proportional representation allows for the both the progressive left and far right which today feel left out to form their own groups. They can then get into congress and slowly let the steam out while likely enacting some change which all can accept.
Thank you for highlighting the need for electoral reform, and pointing towards the "winner takes all" nature of most US elections as being the poisonous tree from which these fruits keep falling.
A proportional voting system would both allow new parties to emerge and prevent extremist or divisive candidates from leading those parties. That in turn would give people more options and make them more likely to vote (and less likely to excuse bad actors within their own party).
I would be careful about directing the blame at "single member districts", though. In the US, the most popular type of reform seems to be Instant Run-off Voting, which has its flaws, but avoids the potential criticism that multi-member districts face, namely that a voter's elected representative may end up living much further away from them. (Personally I'd rather a representative who is closer to my political viewpoint than to my physical residence, but I think that much of the criticism for multi-member districts are in bad faith anyway, and thus not amenable to reasoned debate).
I'd say the problem with Instant Run-off is that it feels good and tangible but doesn't accomplish anything.
A prime example is the Australian parliament, where the lower chamber is essentially IRV while the upper chamber has some variation of multi member districts.
The lower chamber has 4.5% of the seats being outside the two major blocks, the senate has 18.5%. I.e., the people want more choice but the system does not allow for it.
IRV doesn't solve the problem of gerrymandering either.
I'm completely with you on the distance vs. political opinions. There is something extremely powerful in electing one, who has personally convinced you, from your town to go and represent us all, but the world doesn't operate on that scale anymore.
That's an interesting analysis, thank you, but I'm not sure how much of the problem is due to the deficiency of IRV and how much is due to other idiosyncratic features of the Australian political scene (such as the influence of Murdoch media, or even the policy of mandatory voting).
In any case, fortunately there are better options out there than IRV, even with the requirement that districts don't change size. One popular (and simple) option is Approval Voting, although it is slightly harder to count than plurality (at least by hand, since you need to separate ballots into potentially 2^n piles, for n candidates).
The alternative I'd recommend is Asset Voting, where the ballots, districts, and counting remain the same, but after the count is complete, the losing candidates (from least popular to most) get to reassign their votes to other candidates until one of them has over 50%.
Months ago someone posted a research paper on here that came to the conclusion that the only reliable way to avoid two dominant parties is approval voting.
I can't find that paper using this site's search feature, and I'd be very surprised if it didn't have a questionable definition of "reliable" or considered only a limited set of possible reforms.
There may be some clever game-theoretic argument that could be made about spherical voters in a vacuum, but I think that "political science" results are likely to depend too much on data with too small a sample size (for example, the set of countries that use Approval Voting for national elections).
I think it turns out that it is relatively easy to divide any culture into two polarized groups if you have learned how. There is a certain set of intrinsic values which can be grouped together through something of an engineering process to create maximum polarization, and there are fields which have now figured out how to do it.
It looks even worse and obvious when looking from outside. As a non-American, when reading news from the US, I use a few different sources with different political leanings. To say there are 2 realities in America is putting it lightly. It's like watching two unrelated movies about the same theme/place, but with vastly different histories that resulted in each reality. Almost like having two cultures, two countries. I don't know what point I'm trying to make but it is really unnerving to watch. It seems that the media in America has zero integrity and face zero consequences.
Maybe it is social media's fault. Maybe, just maybe, social media and information overload (which reduces critical thought in that moment) is the problem. Nevermind propaganda & conspiracies - just the bubble effects + overloaded conflicting information causes some kind of mental disorder but on a national scale. Too much nonsense being internalize and associated with, on a weekly basis, at some point America will have to ask itself if it is all worth it (social media, 24/7 news & streaming (and not to mention porn and the warping of minds)).
Maybe it is just a result of your political system, that this was always the outcome, because you only have 2 sides. Our world and human life/culture cannot just be boiled down to 2 options. There are so much complexity, nuance and scope context that gets ignored if you are forced to pick 1 of 2 options.
Maybe it is just a result of your economic system & regulations and related social structure & social programs. Maybe, just maybe your people are so badly squeezed to live decent lives (esp when it comes to wages/labour vs the cost of living and your bizarre take on healthcare). Maybe it is the greed and tax system favouring "the already rich". Maybe it is because your political system has too much money flowing through it (much of your political practices are illegal elsewhere).
How can you convince a group of people that they are wrong or doing the wrong thing? When the battlefield is rooted in idealogical is very difficult to convince people otherwise (see religions). Trying to convince the people that invaded your capitol will be fruitless. Punishing them will be fruitless too. Nothing you do will change their minds, cause their minds have been warped to believe in a different reality to what the rest of the world sees.
All I know is that America has a lot of reflecting to do to find/re-find your national identity and to decide if the dragon you've been chasing is the right thing. I truly hope you can find a way without thousands of people dying in civil wars etc (nevermind covid).
The other is “living” in their little Jim Crow fantasyland.
What’s happing today is the result of reality intruding on their fantasy. It’s the same mechanism that causes earthquakes, or psychotic breaks when people can no longer keep up the appearance of being that up-and-coming Hollywood screenwriter.
Even Pence, McConnell, and Mattis are calling this what it is: a fascist insurrection, led by a failed President. So congratulations on the audacity to both-side this.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Fairness-Doctrine
Fairness doctrine, U.S. communications policy formulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that required licensed radio and television broadcasters to present fair and balanced coverage of controversial issues of interest to their communities, including by devoting equal airtime to opposing points of view.
Repealed in the 1996 telecom deregulation bill that cleared the way for the internet also took away the responsibility of the media to provide truth in the news.
Instead of charging for use of spectrum, it was given to TV and radio networks but they were required to provide responsible and truthful news.
Maybe that was a good idea ? Perhaps, the old timers knew a thing or two about how to keep an informed public so that democracy would work.
Go ahead and down vote me like usual. But I am not wrong.
Many of the US's problems have been subdivided along political lines such that no solution can be brought forward as both sides benefit from the lack of a solution.
3-4 decades of utter gridlock has left the country with both a power vacuum and many aggrieved parties looking for a break from the status quo.
We eliminated the fairness doctrine, and Roger Ailes swore there would never be another Watergate because he would create a media organization to prevent it.
The creation of the internet is undoubtedly the biggest factor in this. It created a paradox in people's consumption of information. You not only had the ability to choose what to listen to, you could choose what not to listen.
Another ability the internet has allowed is the creation of communities based around the type of information they consumed which always creates echo-chambers like you pointed out.
It's because of this that many have lost sense of the realities of other people and manifests its own distorted reality.
Not to mention, you also have multi-billion dollar companies utilizing algorithms to keep you there as long as possible, further propagating this effect.
Social and technological forces. Specifically the interplay between the regulatory and economic spheres leads people to take a survival interest in regulation. But voters are rationally ignorant because the bandwidth of the electoral box is less than one bit per year in most cases. So they're interested, but not informed.
Furthermore the world is so complicated and technology is so powerful that people are more affected by simulated reality than real reality. Major events that affect people's lives are mediated by technology that can be used to convey falsity as easily as truth (perhaps easier).
I think it's social media amplifying the divisions through targeting. I also wonder if it's culture of corruption by both political parties that is beginning to come to light? In the old days, you wouldn't read about it in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but now, on Twitter and other places, could could see just about anything. There is a difficult task of separating the truth from the fake news, but there is more information available, which was not available before the Internet explosion. Just my guess, though.
The US’ ruling entity (in the collective egregore sense) would cease to exist and would be replaced by another if all of us regular humans weren’t fed constant new ways to divide and hate each other.
There's too much truth for most of us, so we hide in the comforting illusions of conspiracies and deception. (especially when in some countries, like the US, there's no checks on whether the information shared is accurate or not, and there's a shortage of fact checking even among the professionals....)
Most people do to one extent or another, just it might be wiser to vett them from time to time. It's a way of dealing with overwhelming information.
I think the internet is only being used as a tool;
Peter Turchin says its overproduction of the elites, too many lawyers and managers chasing too few positions leads them to fight more vigorously over a limited turf. It's turf wars gone bitter.
Social media algorithms are designed to maximize engagement by spoon feeding you content you like. Everyone likes being right, so these algorithms actively create and reinforce echo chambers.
Things were going bad enough as they were... then the pandemic hit and people turned to social media as their primary means for safe socialization. The breakdown of social discourse over the last year has been disheartening at best and horrifying at worst.
Modern social media and the internet is a big part of enabling masses of people to hear what they want to hear, which begets more seeking out and hearing what they want to hear, which reinforces what they've already been hearing. The root of all evil? Unfortunately enough, it seems to be the act of giving everyone an equal voice. Giving a platform for any idea to take hold really means anything ideas can take hold.
There aren’t two physical realities but there are many social realities. Borders/societies/cultures/religions/laws/... are invented by humans and become real (as in has real impact on physical reality).
Start there, since that is the historic start point.
Many of these things are side effects of how networks of people propagate information, and where the people can be co-opted using specifically coded content.
The rest of it can also be seen as a trade off between 1-on-1 communication and Many-to-Many communications + speed of interaction.
All of the above, but also politicians who have promised change forever and not much seems to change when one side takes over.
Add to that a pandemic lockdown championed by one side who can mostly sit safely behind a screen while the other side loses their livelyhood in small businesses.
Something had to give. I hope this will be the limit.
To me it feels like a multi-step process, caused by a mix of our worst human tendencies:
1) People prefer news coverage which confirms their previously-held beliefs (aka confirmation bias).
2) News outlets are financially incentivized to deliver news which confirms whatever beliefs we may have, since if we don't then viewers will change the channel. This causes news outlets to balkanize along various points on the political spectrum, ranging from extreme right-wing to extreme left-wing.
3) News outlets receive 100% of the gain of confirming our biases, but pay less than 100% of the total cost of doing so (aka "the tragedy of the commons").
4) Viewers end up consuming primarily (if not exclusively) media which confirms their biases. This becomes a self-reinforcing echo chamber.
5) Simultaneously, there has been a proliferation of media outlets. In the 1950s, there were 2-3 TV channels from which one could consume news. Today, there are 500 channels on DirecTV, and any number of internet news sites / Twitter accounts / etc. where you can get your fix.
6) In the old days, news outlets had to be moderate in their reporting, in order to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Conversely, the more sources of information there are, the louder any individual source must become, in order to stand out from the crowd.
7) With the internet, it's possible to create news outlets which cater to a minority of people who hold extreme viewpoints (aka capturing the long tail of the media market).
8) Over time, there are more and more outlets delivering more and more extreme reportage, and the news we consume becomes more extremist in nature.
9) Since our news diet plays a big part in shaping our worldview, over time we ourselves become more extreme.
I'd love to be wrong about this, since it doesn't bode well for the future of the human race. Someone please restore my faith in humanity by effectively rebutting the points above.
Groups of people latch on to an ideology and act on whatever the leader tells them to do or what they see others do. You can observe this when looking at videos of riots or other mob like behavior.
I doubt it, but the accusations of it drove people in opposition, especially those that did not care about it.
Of course not caring about it was decried as privilege. This was self-victimization to a large degree. People in western nations overwhelmingly did not care about any of these things anymore.
This mostly I think. It's always been a case of birds of a feather flock together. But internet communication has bridged distance and recommendation engines created echo chambers
Arnold Kling's "The Three Languages of Politics" has a good answer to a piece of this puzzle.
In short, the major political 'camps' think about events with a different dimension. Conservatives think in the 'civilization vs barbarism' axis. Progressives think on the 'oppressed vs oppressor' axis. Libertarians think on the 'authoritarian vs freedom' axis.
The same event, when viewed through the corresponding filter, has different interpretations.
Its not two realities. Its one population chunk living in reality and one chunk living in a misinformation fueled delusion. Special interests have managed to weaponize social media and misinformation. It started with allowing blatant lying and partisan propoganda to be framed as impartial news because deliberate mass misinformation is apparently free speech. Now the cat is out of the bag and the only way back is strong regulation of social and news media.
Mainstream media started killed credibility in the 80s and what we see is the result of a media that thinks it speaks for all but represents only half at best.
The President of the United States can’t admit that he lost, and is evidently willing to throw an entire country and political system under the bus in the service of his ego.
One side effect of this personality type seizing power is that the Overton window has been inflated into a vast, festering portal through which our worst nightmares can crawl out. I doubt it was his intent, but it is the result.
You’ve almost got to admire the raw primitive energy and boundlessness of that level of id. How very sad that it has been employed to such feeble ends; it will ultimately have to be crushed for democracy to prevail.
At this point, Trump has effectively created his own political party. If you look at die hard Trump supporters, they're quick to label many republicans as traitors.
If the moderates in the Republican party and the progressives in the Democratic party could hold their noses long enough to do a deal on bringing in proportional representation, perhaps some good could come out of this.
The research done on manipulation of the mind based on the post ww1/2 which most know as artichoke/mkultra/monarch and it's variants in other five eyes have been condensed into a science later solidified and tested in modern wars across the globe (not just GWOT psyops) that is now being exploited on a massive scale via consolidation of power via mergers, aquisitions, and more subtle extension of control over all forms of media (print, tv, radio, and now the internet, as the oligarchs finally recognized it as a primary threat vector), academia, and politics (largely via a progressively worse bribery, coercion, blackmail (Epstein goes here), threats system) that is being used as part of a divide and conquer strategy that enables the hegellian dialectic mostly via limited hangouts and false opositions to create whatever state of reality the supranational elite want.
The reality is there is a conspiracy/are conspiracies that are coordinated by various disparate secret and not secret organizations whose goals sometimes don't but most often do overlap, and occurences like Q-anon and these protests are likely psyop techniques to distract potential genuine movements that might respond or create desired counter-responses in order to limit the fallout while the oligarchs catch up in the race against the internet as the last bastion of freedom of speech that could cause a neo-peasants revolt if the people found out the truth.
The internet allows for mass influence of the population by third party actors. This is largely China vs Russia. I have trouble not playing this out at scale and drawing the conclusion the internet inherently invalidates a lot of the assumptions democracy (as in the American Experiment™ version of it) requires to function. I hope I'm wrong and overly pessimistic.
You're forgetting the largest player, which dwarfs all the others 10 times over - the US itself. The US propaganda machine is so far ahead of Russia and China that even discussing Russian and Chinese influence over the Internet of all places is laughable.
Very true. There are huge language barriers that makes this unlikely. You don't get a 5 cent army of people highly proficient in another language and presenting manipulative talking points. There are those people, but they would still have difficulties reaching large audiences.
I would like to question this a bit. If this were true, wouldn't this mean that China won this time since Biden is the President (vs Russia won in 2016 since Trump was the President)?
I think there are a lot more internal actors, such as special interest groups, PACs, activist groups, etc..., that may dwarf the external influence. There is so much money involved in politics and elections. I wonder how can we curtail the flow of money to make things more civil in politics?
But when you try to imagine how it could be split up there are all kinds of problems. e.g., obviously CA + NY makes sense plus some large cities(e.g., Chicago). It all seems untenable w/o excessive relocation a la Stalin.
Truly splitting up the USA would require a war and that's more trouble than its worth in most peoples' opinions: I've kinda grown fond of letting my neighbor's kid cut the lawn for $25, even though he is a Democrat.
Now, OTOH, spinning off a state or two is within reach: e.g., giving CA and NY their independence would be fine with me. But then that's just me!8-))
Denialism. Wanting something so badly to be true that you try to change the world to make it true. Humans have a unique ability to shape their world with thoughts alone. Borders, nations, cultures, laws etc. are humans making up stuff that then becomes real (as in having real consequences).
I think these three books offer a solid framework for providing an answer to your question:
1) The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert Reich [0]
- Reich drops the buzzword neoliberalism in favor of the word power. I like that as neoliberalism is a terrible phrase for the concept it describes, but make no mistake, it's the insidious, invisible nature of neoliberalism that put our country in a position where neither party served the people well. That is what Reich describes here.
2) The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News-and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman [1]
- There is also a Showtime miniseries based on the book you could watch. Pair with the movie Bombshell
3) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer [2]
The same way any cult-like phenomenon divorces its followers from reality.
In this case a charismatic demagogue (Donald Trump) has built a cult of personality around himself. He and his enablers employ many of the tactics used by other cult-like organizations, such religious organizations (e.g. scientology), or otherwise (i.e. multilevel marketing schemes). These organizations offer the opportunity to be apart of something "great" and "historic", to teach you how to be strong, to transform yourself from "zero to hero", and have fellowship with other like minded individuals who have the will and desire to improve their lives too. In return they demand absolute, unquestioning, and unwavering fealty.
This has little to do with political orientation (left vs right) and everything to do with Donald Trump. There is currently a "civil war" going on inside the GOP, and the most vicious attacks from the cult-of-MAGA tend to be aimed at members of the political right who voice even the slightest dissent and are thus deemed "insufficiently loyal" (i.e. counterrevolutionaries).
A boiling frog variant of social scale depression. Not enough positive news, too many cracks, doubts. The rest is human nature regressing due to this imbalance. Absolutely not helped by hectic shallow news and social tissue of the day.
Re the comments about flags: the messy tug-of-war that you're seeing between upvoting, flagging, and moderating is what always happens with this kind of story, so if you're drawing any significant conclusion about HN from this one case, it's probably exaggerated: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
While I have you: before commenting, make sure you're up to date on the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They've changed significantly in the last year. Here's the kind of discussion we want: thoughtful, curious, substantive. Here's the kind we don't want: snarky, reflexive, attacking. Make sure you can follow the core rule—"Be kind."—and its corollary, which hasn't yet made it into the doc: "If you're hot under the collar, please cool down before posting." That's in your interest for two reasons: your views will be better represented, and you'll help to preserve the all-too-fragile commons that we all depend on.
(Also, for those who haven't seen any of my annoying mentions of this yet, large threads on HN are currently paginated for performance reasons, which means you need to click More at the bottom of the thread to get to the rest of the comments—or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661474&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661474&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661474&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25661474&p=5)