I see things almost completely opposite to you. Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information. You would get things from your local newspaper, or tv networks. Professionals would work and filter what we see. Today anyone can fire up a blog, twitter, youtube, and start talking about anything. People today thus have been getting exposed to all kinds of ideas, and being taken in by them: the earth is flat, the election was stolen, etc, and believing it.
I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.
"because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable"
I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.
Democracy is built on trusting the populace to self govern. Saying that the populace is too dumb or uninformed to be trusted to self govern is inherently anti-democratic.
Well I think the fascism comes with the conclusion, i.e. "because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable, therefore we must control them"
Whereas something like "because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable, therefore we must provide them with the tools to understand what is reasonable" isn't necessarily fascist.
Fascism calls out the problem but has the wrong solutions. It's tied to race, nationalism, authoritarianism, and other tribal aspects that are easy for some to grab onto but really do not have any place being part of the solution.
If you talk to anyone defending the anti-democractic occupation of the nation's capital today, you'll see that their response is typically is pro-fascist in this regard.
Even this morning, they quoted Adolf Hitler at the capital:
Fascism does not see the problem, it is the problem.
The grandiose, arrogant, and blind social elites calling out the popular masses to be socially alienated.
Whose social alienation it would be?
Of course such masses will be of service to any any much significant opportunist group.
People will vote even for a devil himself if one promises to get rid them off such elites.
Just like that, 20 years ago, in a country far, far away, the destitute populace decided, in its sane mind, to vote into power not anybody, but an ex-officer from a mafia-like intelligence organisation people worked so hard to remove from power just 10 years prior.
When I say calls out the problem, I mean fascism speaks to the class rift, and tells them all the wrong ideas and solutions. We agree that this is creating even worse problems.
The wealth divide in the U.S. has been steadily increasing, and the solution for the working class (higher education) isn't working like it used to, even making it worse for young people. This has lead to an angry working class who feel justified in blaming their problems on other out-groups, whether that's BLM, democrats, China, Mexicans, tech companies, doctors, lgtbq, etc.
This is what fascism is feeding on in America, and it has to stop.
> When I say calls out the problem, I mean fascism speaks to the class rift, and tells them all the wrong ideas and solutions. We agree that this is creating even worse problems.
There, we are on the same page.
A good historical example I brought up few weeks ago somewhere on HN.
A shameful truth from NSDAP days Germans did not come to admit even to this day is why Kristallnacht has happened.
The prime majority of Germans were not antisemites in thirties, and not even in forties. The image of the schizophrenoid—paranoid antisemite was completely uncharacteristic for anybody, but for single digit percentage of fanatics not unlike the current rightist crowd in America.
So, if most Germans did not drink the NSDAP coolaid, why did Kristallnacht happen?
It happened not because of Jewish people being Jewish as such. It happened because of Jewish people being rich (or being deemed so,) and NSDAP effectively promising complete impunity for looting.
I really wonder about the accuracy of "Jewish people being rich". I seem to remember there was a massive Jewish proletariat that went straight to the camps. German Jewish population might have fared a little better economically (but that remains to be proved with numbers) but I believe most of Eastern Europe Jewish population was NOT rich. So I get your point but I am afraid things are little more complex. (Any sources about the topic welcome)
I think a more correct way to say it wouldn't be "because of Jewish people being rich", but "because of Jewish people being perceived as rich as a group".
I don't think anyone in their right mind would try arguing that most jewish people in Germany at the time were rich, because that was definitely not the case at all.
Indeed, they weren't that reach at all, and they were on the forefront of the proletarian movement.
But now we have all the benefit of the hindsight, and we cannot go back to thirties, and tell that to masses going crazy from destitution, and poverty.
The vast majority of Jews in Germany back then were dirt poor though. The issue is while most Germans weren’t particularly anti-Semitic, they didn’t care enough about it to object.
USA now is basically France of early-mid-19th century.
My clumsy prognosis, USA will more or less repeat the route towards the French style liberal state, possibly, with few Napoleons along the way. And if it wouldn't, then it may well end up Weimarized.
Think of the "establishment" as the Ancien Régime.
Kings, and governments were replaced like worn gloves in 19th century, but the regime in general was always kind of stuck no matter what angry masses did.
Nobility, bourgeois, wealthy burghers, revolutionary hipsters kept changing, while poor, unwashed masses were kept being oppressed, and handing power to the next group of tricksters out of four above again, and again.
Changing the order of the operands does not change the resulting product.
Guillotines were only finally retired when the collective elite class was compelled to genuinely start improving the situation of downtrodden classes for the fear for their own lives, rather than some romantic altruism.
> Fascism does not see the problem, it is the problem.
Nobody is even close to implementing a fascist system in America. This is the kind of thing people who don't actually know anything about Fascism say. Trump was not a Fascist or even close to it.
Stop falling into the tired rhetoric of the 20th century. New words are needed to name the problem.
The name for the system that you need to start using is "Totalitarian Liberalism". The leader is less important than the sum total bureaucratic control that slowly and "rationally" usurps freedom, flexibility, and leisure time from society for the benefit of the people who have the most influence over policy.
It is not a populist system that benefits the aristocracy and the working class by aligning corporate and state power in the national interest (fascism) nor a system that purports to benefit the working class by giving them the means of production (communism) - it is a system that works to benefit the existing rich by exploiting and undermining social divides, papering over them with rules and laws that marginalize the entire working class while setting it against itself.
* strident, often exclusionary nationalism - ("America First") check.
* fixation with national decline (real or perceived) and threats to the existence of the national community - ("MAGA") check.
* embrace of paramilitarism - ("stand back and stand by") check.
* led by an authoritarian leader who claims to embody the national will. - check.
* protecting or elevating the rights of the national community above the rights of those seen as alien - ("build a wall", "I don't care, do u?") check.
* removing obstacles to national unity and suppressing those seen as challenging it - (myth of "stolen" votes, "Deep State" narrative) check.
* expanding the size and influence of the national state - (To be fair, this has been the military industrial complex for quite a long time. Nothing unique here) normalized/not unique here
* often, also seeking to expand territory through armed conflict - (Also, already a characteristic of the U.S. forever war to protect its interests globally) normalized/not unique here
Merriam-Webster:
Definition of fascism
1. often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
early instances of army fascism and brutality
— J. W. Aldridge
Don't know where you're getting your definition from.
Using your example, I could make a pretty compelling case substituting in JFK. I think there has to be some form of evaluation not so easily bent to what one wants to see.
Wrong, I am strongly against using terms like facist or nazi for the purpose of insulting or otherizing someone you do not like. However he clearly ticks the majority of elements of a Facist leader. You do not know what facism is.
> It is not a populist system that benefits the aristocracy and the working class by aligning corporate and state power in the national interest (fascism)
But that's exactly Trumps presidency? Or at least what he was attempting.
What you're missing is that fascism doesn't align ALL of the groups, just a fraction of each, and blames failures on the ones that aren't in that alignment
Why do you say Trump was not close to fascism? I thought the combination of populism + nationalism + law/order + charismatic leadership + monied interests was close to fascist.
What she quoted, "Who ever has the youth has the future" .. well, that's right.
People are seriously afraid of things like Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology being taught in our schools. It's indoctrinating kids and parent's don't have a choice about it being taught to their kids.
She is literally quoting Hitler to show what the LEFT is doing in schools and how it's WRONG. This reaction is taken entirely out of context.
We are exerting control, but not complete control, and it's certainly not fascism.
Ideally, yes, everyone could understand every concept from the ground up and be able to engage in reasonable discourse about anything.
At this point, the complexity of the world precludes the majority of people from doing that, which is why we have specialization.
Practically speaking, people rely on authoritative sources to gain information about something so they can form opinions and make decisions. Those authorities do define what's reasonable based on different attributes, and in doing so exert control, but that doesn't make what they're doing fascist. It's done because the amount of complexity present in the world requires it.
Are not you then suggesting that the conclusions they should reach to be reasonable? There is nothing that says democracy has to produce a reasonable system, and most people could point to an area where it's not, at least subjectively.
People making suggestions to each other is a fundamental part of democracy. Of course it is not guaranteed to produce reasonable results, but I think we should help it along in that direction.
> You can help people reach reasoned conclusions without telling them what conclusions to reach.
In theory, &/or to some degree.
It's also worth noting that "reasoned conclusions" are not necessarily what is True. Rather than desiring that humanity strives for Rationality, wouldn't it make more sense to aim higher? To instead desire that humanity pursues Truth? This way, we can improve all people: the members of our outgroups and our ingroups.
Millennia of philosophers have searched for Truth, and as far as I can tell we are no closer to definitively finding it. But it seems to me that the best way to find the truth (with a small T) is by rationality; the alternative is irrationality which seems unlikely to be effective. My hope is that, by collaborating using the tools of reason combined with our own personal Truths, humanity could do our best by everyone involved. I don’t know for certain that it will work, but it seems like the best way we’ve got.
> and as far as I can tell we are no closer to definitively finding it
Perhaps it has been found but not distributed, or accepted. If we found it, would we even know? Would we be willing to acknowledge it, and practice it?
> But it seems to me that the best way to find the truth (with a small T) is by rationality; the alternative is irrationality which seems unlikely to be effective.
This seems like a bit of a false dichotomy to me.
Reality is rarely exactly as it seems.
> My hope is that, by collaborating using the tools of reason combined with our own personal Truths, humanity could do our best by everyone involved.
Perhaps, assuming (at least) we have no major flaws in our premises, or our systems (democracy theatre). I do share your hope though.
> I don’t know for certain that it will work, but it seems like the best way we’ve got.
It may be the best we've got now, but have we put any serious effort into finding alternatives? The horse and buggy was the best we had until someone invented the car; NASA was the best we had until Elon Musk started SpaceX, and so forth and so on.
I’m struggling to understand your point. If we do find Truth, or a better way, how should we best verify we have found it—and convince others of that—and apply it—if not by careful application of reason? If there are flaws in our premises and systems, by what alternate means do you propose we find and determine how to correct them?
Some things that people feel strongly about may not "resolve" according to reason. That you've only ever been inside your own mind (with it's processor, and its model, which is derived from its "lived experiences") might have had some influence on how you believe that other people think. But if you look at what's going on around you, does this seem likely? The question then is: it is it that these people just(!) "aren't reasonable", or might there be something else going on? I don't doubt it's partially true, but what is really going on in other people's heads is unknown to you and me.
> by what alternate means do you propose we find and determine how to correct them
A reasonable thing to do would be to perhaps ask people what their problem is. Funny thing is though, it seems like this reasonable idea hasn't occurred to any "reasonable" people, as far as I know anyways.
A more ambitious approach would be to perform a comprehensive and careful examination of the other styles of thinking & belief systems that are out there. When you read threads like this one, do you get a strong sense that a large percentage of the people in here have actually done that? I don't, perhaps because I've actually done just that, at least do a large degree. I know that 75%+ of the people in here are running largely on heuristics, likely combined with some first hand experience (perhaps with a side order of confirmation bias), and likely plenty of consumption of "proper, trustworthy journalism", written by people who are also running on heuristics.
Very few people have a very good knowledge of how the mind works, and almost no one seems to have excellent knowledge, including things like edge case behaviors. Another thing you may notice in culture war threads like this one is the lack of curiosity/uncertainty/humility - but you may not notice it unless you are consciously looking for it. That's another thing about the mind: it's not so great at seeing things that aren't there, or knowing things that it doesn't know. I believe that this is a partial cause for the perceptions of omniscience that are always on full display in threads like this. Ironically, omniscience is a fairly reasonable perception for a neural network like the subconscious mind - after all, how do you reason about data that is not in your model?
Such things can be learned, but why would one go to the effort of learning something new if you already know everything worth knowing? That would be unreasonable.
As for the general utility of using reason as an approach to our problems - HN is surely an above average intelligence forum. The conversation that's going on in this thread (and the many others like it that occur on a regular basis), is this what "reason" looks like? And if people on HN can't even manage it, how reasonable is it to expect joe sixpack to pull it off?
And so I shall take my downvotes, and we will repeat this same process tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and eventually we will all reach our expiration date and our children can continue this process, and then pass it down to their offspring - The eternal circle of life. Well, eternal, provided another nation who doesn't suffer from this cultural affliction doesn't rise to power and ruin our party that is. That would be a real bummer.
On the topic of things going on in other people’s heads, you seem to be arguing against a point I wasn’t trying to make at all. When I hear “the tools to understand what is reasonable” and write of “finding the truth” and “collaborating using the tools of reason” I think of things like statistics courses and advancing the theory of systemantics. Reading your reply, it’s hard for me to tell exactly what you’ve heard, but it sounds like you may have instead understood this as my desiring to impose my beliefs of truth on others, which is not what I meant at all.
It sounds like we’re actually in violent agreement; I also think that we should be seeking each others’ perspectives. We’ve approached this conversation from different angles; the tack I’ve taken is to assume that is a given and consider ways to encourage it to happen productively. Of course people are not “just(!) unreasonable”; but even if the things they feel strongly about cannot themselves be reconciled by reason, it is still a useful tool to effect action based on those beliefs. I (and, it seems, you) seek tools to help reconcile differing beliefs and ensure that shared goals—whatever they may be—might have the most effective plan of action.
With that said, a few comments on particulars:
> When you read threads like this one, do you get a strong sense that a large percentage of the people in here have actually ... perform a comprehensive and careful examination of the other styles of thinking & belief systems that are out there?
Not really, no, but I also didn’t get the impression that you had done that, either, so there you go. I haven’t, either, very much; it’s an incredibly large field, so I rely heavily on encountering them by happenstance (though I do try to increase the chances of that occurring), which brings me to my next point:
> 75%+ of the people in here are running largely on heuristics
Running on heuristics is all we can do; the world is too large and complex for anything else. The best we can do is tune them carefully and be prepared to change them (using, of course, more heuristics; as you noted in your first paragraph this is heavily influenced by existing priors).
> Another thing you may notice in culture war threads like this one is the lack of curiosity/uncertainty/humility...
Any online thread is likely to be skewed towards a lack of visible curiosity; that is frequently satisfied by merely reading, whereas the most prolific way to produce content is by debate.
> if people on HN can't even manage it, how reasonable [! —ed.] is it to expect joe sixpack to pull it off?
Under present circumstances, perhaps not. But I’d still like to keep nudging things in that direction, and maybe someday we’ll get there.
> On the topic of things going on in other people’s heads, you seem to be arguing against a point I wasn’t trying to make at all.
Perhaps it's due to a difference in our thinking styles. You said:
>> But it seems to me that the best way to find the truth (with a small T) is by rationality; the alternative is irrationality which seems unlikely to be effective. My hope is that, by collaborating using the tools of reason combined with our own personal Truths, humanity could do our best by everyone involved. I don’t know for certain that it will work, but it seems like the best way we’ve got.
To "do our best by everyone involved", does that not involve society and the people that live within it, who act according to the virtual reality that is contained within their minds?
Now, maybe you weren't "making that point" (or in other words, thinking of it from that perspective), but this kind of gets into the distinction between Reality and Truth. (For more on that, see the 3rd video I linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662949)
> When I hear “the tools to understand what is reasonable” and write of “finding the truth” and “collaborating using the tools of reason” I think of things like statistics courses and advancing the theory of systemantics. Reading your reply, it’s hard for me to tell exactly what you’ve heard, but it sounds like you may have instead understood this as my desiring to impose my beliefs of truth on others, which is not what I meant at all.
Oh no, I'm not saying that it is your (conscious) intent to "impose my beliefs of truth on others" (but I would speculate that this could manifest unintentionally, via simple democracy). My point is that you seem to hold the axiom that "things like statistics courses and advancing the theory of systemantics" are the only modalities of thinking that we have at our disposal.
As for things like Systemantics, I am a huge proponent of this sort of thinking. But you may (or may not) notice a near complete lack of this sort of thinking (that we live within a complex, semi-indeterminate system) in threads like this.
> It sounds like we’re actually in violent agreement; I also think that we should be seeking each others’ perspectives.
Yes, I would very much like for HN to adopt this culture. Alas, it seems more than people here can muster, which is one of my prime complaints. I have also suggested an experimental solution to resolve this inability in the comment I linked above. Alas, @dang seems uninterested in trying to improve things, despite his (I presume) perception that he wants HN forums to be a force for good in the world. The mind has massive capabilities for imagination, but it seems there are certain places that this imagination will not go: into itself, or one's tribe.
> but even if the things they feel strongly about cannot themselves be reconciled by reason, it is still a useful tool to effect action based on those beliefs.
True. My point is, consider the possibility that you are hitting a kind of hard limit of this approach. I believe that this is where humanity now finds itself - we are metaphorically building ever taller towers of technological capability based on our capacity for reason (science, engineering, etc), but we find ourselves unable to manage the societal consequences of the system we've built ourselves to live in. Perhaps it is indeed possible to solve this increasingly risky situation with reason - but what if it isn't? What if your intuition (which is what it is) is wrong? Disproving hypotheses is a fundamental part of the scientific process, and yet look how eager we are to skip over that part when dealing with indeterminate domains.
> Not really, no, but I also didn’t get the impression that you had done that, either
And then there is: What is True.
> so there you go.
You and me both, and the society we live in. And where are we going? I don't know, but the neighbourhood outside the window I'm looking out of is starting to get a little scary, by my standards anyways. Maybe I just have to work on my thrill seeking skills. Although, I don't get the sense from others in this thread that they're seeking thrills, so do they see something different outside their windows? Or is something else going on?
> it’s an incredibly large field, so I rely heavily on encountering them by happenstance
As do most people, and I can appreciate why: it is indeed a very large field, and it seems to take years just to get even a rough lay of the landscape. But what I can't appreciate is that "reasonable, informed" people (like my brethren here on HN, or so they tell me) seem to have no curiosity when such ideas arise. What they do have though, is downvotes. But to be clear: I don't appreciate it, but I do understand it. I propose that once one has traversed the right parts of these lands, you can begin to notice the very same, simple patterns always and everywhere (hence my suggestion in my other comment).
> Running on heuristics is all we can do; the world is too large and complex for anything else. The best we can do is tune them carefully and be prepared to change them (using, of course, more heuristics; as you noted in your first paragraph this is heavily influenced by existing priors).
These beliefs are derived from a heuristic (resting upon axioms and premises). Why not apply the very tool you are recommending: (first principles based) reasoning? Once again, is this not at least suggestive of a fundamantal shortcoming in that approach? On one hand, you surely know (in one state of mind [1] that is) that your knowledge is limited, and yet you speak as if it isn't (another one of the common patterns I refer to above).
> Any online thread is likely to be skewed towards a lack of visible curiosity
If this was /r/politics, I wouldn't complain. But this lack of curiosity combined with the abundance of self-congratulatory claims of intelligence in these threads is a bit off-putting to me - and I am a great lover of irony!
> whereas the most prolific way to produce content is by debate.
I dream of a day that we can manage a debate here on HN, on culture war topics, with the same mental discipline we demonstrate when debating determinate domains, like programming, hardware, etc. Heck, I'd even be happy if someone could agree that the noticeable degradation in quality of discourse on topics like this, combined with the gravity of the topics (ie: climate change), might be substantial enough to at least consider trying to do something about.
> But I’d still like to keep nudging things in that direction, and maybe someday we’ll get there.
That is what I have been trying to do for quite some time now: nudge people into a higher state of consciousness - to get them to at least realize what is going on in threads like this. But it seems to be an unpopular idea.
I would like to say though: despite the harshness of my tone and words, this has been the best conversation I've had on HN in a very long time, so thank you for that.
'The News' - which is mostly credible, is mostly not a form of state propaganda.
'The News' in the US, is a 'reasonable' form of credible information.
'Facebook' is generally not a good source of truthful information. It's a very open and free place to communicate, which is wonderful, but it's just not a good truthiness signal.
Enough with this idea that anything but 'everyone on a soapbox' is somehow fascist. Every community has sources that are more legitimately authoritative than others.
When you have a revolving door from the intelligence agencies into the news commentariat, along with speech writers/communications staff for politicians, I think that it's safe to eye "The News" as being at best an unwitting tool of state propaganda, if not an open-eyed broker/distributor of it. I could maybe cut them some slack for eagerly and uncritically repeating the feeds from "unnamed intelligence sources", but when you're paying the nominally "retired" members of the community to help craft the narrative, it's hard to view them as "mostly credible".
It is completely false to suggest that 'political speech writers' and some influence of 'narrative' by state bureaucracies entirely discredits the free press.
'The problem with the press' are their own internal narratives and biases, not any external influence.
The press are generally free to report on what they see, and they do that. It's their opinion that gets in the way.
And ironically, if there are bits they're afraid to report it's definitely not political, it's corporate, for fear of losing advertising revenue.
It reeks of fascist or authoritarian thought - distrust of the people and then "helping them see the light" is a strategy that goes off the rails almost certainly.
> “we must provide them with the tools to understand what is reasonable"
There is just the same as “control them” and in practice is how fascism works. The DDR didn’t rely primarily on stasi breaking kneecaps to enforce order.
Have you seen the crap that people believe and the shitty sources that they're accepting the information from? The Facts AKA barely plausible bullshit is being served to anyone who wants to believe in an alternate yet more interesting reality fitting their own beliefs.
Social media has given everyone a soap box, a megaphone and a repeater and the ability to piggyback on other people's shouting directly into people's ears and eyes. Do you think this is a good thing? No one is vetting anyone seriously, no one is being consistently judged on their honesty, accuracy, track record or motives.
It's not entirely about being dumb, more and more it's turning out to be about how much time people are able to commit to understanding what they're reading. This is why people are known as experts in the first place. Do you really think everyone is capable enough to handle the highly nuanced planning and decision making necessary for governing millions of people on the balance of thousands of existing laws and regulations?
Sometimes you can't boil information down into something that everyone can understand in a short enough amount of time which would be what is necessary for each person to play a role in democracy. Just like we pay someone to fix our plumbing we should be paying our politicians to figure this stuff out for us.
We don't have the time or attention span. It's impossible.
> I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.
No it's not. This is declaring a problem -- which I think is a very real problem -- but not suggesting a solution. I don't believe anyone is suggesting fascism is the solution to this problem -- except for you.
But now that you've provided this unreasonable response, it's now much more difficult to discuss it. You've unintentionally provided an example of the very thing we're talking about.
He is suggesting a solution - self governance. Trust the people to make their own decisions, because there is no better alternative. What else can we do, have some committee that decides what the public is allowed to hear? That is fascism.
Nobody is suggesting getting rid of democracy -- this is red herring. This is a bad faith argument about bad faith arguments. It's no wonder people can't decide which direction is up.
In a conversation that is supposedly about how people are being mislead by media we're 2 seconds away of Godwin's law again. It's exhausting.
Nothing in the world is a binary choice - reducing the potential solutions into either or does a disservice to attempts to find reasonable resolutions. In fact I'd say nearly nobody on earth wants to trust people to make all of their own decisions because those decisions impact other people. The choice to murder someone is not a choice we'd like to allow people to freely make without consequence.
We can destroy anonymity on the internet and punish people who spread malicious provable lies, calls for violence, or hate especially people who do so in an organized fashion.
An idiot who shares something untrue that he ought to have known was false is materially different from someone who fabricates something and ultimately directly and by proxy misinforms 10 million people.
The choice isn't between tyranny or absolute freedom. It's about our actions shaping the bones of society. The current framework isn't mere ground truth we must accept we can reshape it if we desire and perhaps we should.
We should not. Free speech is the only thing that keeps this society glued together, and the actions against free speech taken by the technological elite and it‘s companies over the last several years have primed the landscape for conflict.
You can’t just squeeze the screw tighter on this.
The idea of “I know better than you, therefore I control what you see and say or else” is the absolute height of arrogance.
> We can destroy anonymity on the internet and punish people who spread malicious provable lies
First of all, plenty of the people currently spreading lies on the internet are doing so under their own names and have built some celebrity and a career out of it, so I don't know why you think that anonymity contributes to the problem in any real way.
But more importantly, how exactly do you propose to "punish people" who spread lies? With what form of punishment? Is this a formal system of punishment, or some informal system?
If formal: Under what jurisdiction? How does your proposed system determine the truth, and if it can determine the truth how does it determine which lies are malicious enough to be deserving of punishment?
If informal: How does it differ from what we have today, in the form of people arguing with each other and occasionally trying to get each other banned from social media or otherwise made unpublishable or unemployable?
This seems like an argument from 'my opponent believes something that could possibly be used to justify something bad'. People are not equipped to understand what is reasonable. No one is. 90% of being reasonable is just following with the herd because the world is really really hard to understand. That is an argument against democracy, and also every other form of government involving people at any level. Such is life, at least until some kind of weird technical solution pops up.
To reinforce this point we agree[1] that some experiences can be so extreme as to cause long term psychological damage. PTSD is a really extreme example of not being able to cope with what reality was (due to generally experiencing an extremely bad portion of reality) - so I wanted to reinforce that at the extremes information can be damaging and different people do have different tolerances of how they cope with such information.
I'm not saying that reading a news article is equivalent to PTSD but it's a spectrum and we all sort of need to accept that different people have different abilities and tolerances when it comes to being exposed to extremism and propaganda - heck we'd all probably pride ourselves here as being able to see through the BS of most advertising but we also need to acknowledge that advertising is effective on a lot of folks.
But the population is too dumb to do a lot of things, "self governance" by believing what Rudy Giuliani lies about on Twitter isn't a valid source.
The same way that there are large pockets of disease outbreak in rich areas of the country because moms with accounting degrees think they're smart enough to be immunologists because they have an internet connection.
We're literally watching democracy die in real time and its directly due to social media and internet disinformation, on top of the already existing radio/tv disinformation.
Just a thought, but the party closer to the ruling parties of nearly every other country where average life expectancy hasn't been on the decline, unlike the US.
Here is a comparison of US life expectancy vs a selection of socialist governed nations[0].
US life expectancy may have plateaued, but doesn't appear to be in decline, and it's still above even Cuba, which has perhaps the highest amount of social spending on healthcare as portion of GDP.
Meanwhile, Venezuela and Mexico are in clear declines.
With regards to which extremes of the political spectrum have the highest body counts, I would say the far-left Marxist states are the clear winners, with somewhere in the region of 42 to 160 million killed.
Just to clarify it looks like that chart has a number of specifically chosen countries. I'd suggest you add some more western countries with socialized medicine - Canada is well above the US as is the UK and I think those are both pretty comparable to the US in terms of personal wealth... Oh also Sweden is well above, but Sweden tends to be an outlier due to just how well socialism is working there.
Yeah, it was certainly cherry picked to illustrate a point.
Australia is even higher than Sweeden, yet both the UK and Australia are currently governed by conservative parties.
I'm an Australian myself, and in favor of socialized medicine, I just get annoyed by characterization of left vs right as a good vs evil scenario, as our polarized political discussion so often likes to do.
The answer is instead to support human rights and freedoms, and fight back against attempts to take away our freedoms no matter who is trying to take them away.
Well, one argument would be quality vs quantity, i.e. some people may not weigh all lives equally. Fascist systems seem to be good at promoting such outcomes.
We are a representative republic. Part of that reason is because it is too burdensome to expect the general public to have the information and expertise to be fully involved in governance. We delegate that responsibility to our representatives.
EDIT: I removed a line that was superfluous to my point and was drawing attention away from my actual point.
You are missing the point of my comment. The main focus is not the distinction between democracy and republic. It was that we do not govern ourselves directly. We elect people to do that for us because most of us aren't equipped to do it ourselves. The comment I was replying to called that fascism.
I removed the "We are not a democracy." line in my previous comment to refocus it on what I was really trying to say.
These kind of comments always get downvoted but it is pretty accurate. Certainly people like Madison didn’t want a thriving, egalitarian, democratic, civic culture and nation.
"But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable." -- Alexander Hamilton
I think that's unfair. On this website specifically we're very tended towards college educated. If you follow the bright path you can end up being somewhat sheltered to the concerns and the motivations of much of the general population.
This leads to people being blindsided by things like Trump or Brexit. Its important to register that we tend towards a slanted world view.
...and importantly, often unable to understand the perspective of others without resorting to patronizing explanations.
I have imperfectly adopted a principle in discourse: that if I have to resort to patronizing explanations to understand, I'm not working hard enough to understand.
It's not that the populace is stupid, it's that the populace is being fed misinformation.
It is the responsibility of, well, everyone, but especially those in power—journalists, politicians, pundits—to act in some semblance of good faith. To try to inform their audience. To not say things they know to be false.
The people storming the capital right now have been told by (1) the president of the united states, (2) the news channels they watch, and very possibly (3) their religious leaders, that Donald Trump would have won the election if not for a conspiracy to rig voting machines and throw away millions of ballots. So of course, in that case, the right thing to do is storm the capital and protect democracy!
The basic problem is that too many public figures have decided to reject their most basic responsibility to society. And I just don't know what to do about that.
"because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable"
> I hear this all the time now. But let's be clear -- this is the talk of fascism.
Nonetheless it seems objectively true to me. This may just be my biased perspective being substantially smarter than average, but I'm continually surprised by how gullible, uneducated, and uninformed the average person is. In the USA especially - stop skimping on your education system there!
I'm also surprised pleasantly by what humans in the aggregate accomplish, so it's not all doom and gloom.
If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed. Classical Western education prized dissent, debate, and dialectic for thousands of years, but education has changed dramatically in the decades since the 60s. Perhaps it is not for the better. Societies do not always progress upwards towards "more enlightened". Western education has stopped valuing objective truth, dissent, scientific method, and moral integrity. When those are gone, there is very little common ground between those who disagree, because even the method of discourse is gone. That is when force becomes valued by all sides, since they can no longer make any progress by words.
Im not sure the education has changed -- examples of previously not valuing truth include things like the south teaching that the civil war was about something other than slavery
What has changed is the scale of information though. We used to have small amounts of information and opinions to evaluat, but now there's huge amounts of information to deal with, and those techniques haven't updated to match.
Peer review of scientific publications is an example there - peer review used to involve things like visiting somebody's lab to try and disprove their new type of radiation theories, and now there's so many articles to review that nobody's reading them all, or putting the same level of review in
Education has changed. Our educational institutions used to be a bastion of free speech where tolerance for disagreement was treasured. This is not the case today, where merely speaking disagreement to the majority narrative gets your professorship cancelled and gets students disciplined.
"Our educational institutions used to be a bastion of free speech where tolerance for disagreement was treasured."
Do you have a specific citation for that? There was Kent State. Before that they were racially and earlier, sexually, ethnically, and religiously, segregated.
Just glancing at the linked spreadsheet, I see way more than 4 events in 2020 for which termination is pretty clearly justified and necessary, so this trend seems to be driven at least in part by a change in behavior by professors and not just others' responses to that behavior. Also worth mentioning that the majority of the listed professors don't seem to have actually been fired or even disciplined - unsuccessful petitions and the like are included.
it's also the case that some groups have become hyper-vigilant about academic "cancellations" in the last several years, which could account for why so many purported incidents have occurred since more attention is being paid to the issue.
I don't see any evidence that this spreadsheet is the result of someone systematically reviewing every case of a professor or other academic being dismissed, rebuked or whatever since 2014, so I don't really see how it could constitute a trend.
seeing a lot of people in this list "denounced in an open letter", "petitioned for firing" and the like. maybe we have different ideas about what it means to be "cancelled".
Even outside of explicit censorship I think that the US education system has been doing a very poor job lately in terms of promoting critical thinking skills. It's too common to see folks come out of the educational system with too much faith put in "both-sides-ism" it's important to empathize and understand different viewpoints but it is lazy to accept all differing views as being equally valid.
For instance, Galileo was not treated well for going against conventional wisdom, and nobody liked vis viva because it wasnt newton's momentum.
Are there people losing their jobs and being cancelled for going against the Copenhagen interpretation today?
Back in the 50s and 60s, Pete Seeger was banned from performing to anyone but young children by the FBI because he may have been a member of the Communist party -- including at educational institutions. Is that still happening today? Has that changed or something?
What's the difference in analytic technique that has changed since that time period? People are still writing essays, running experiments and measuring p values. These are still the methods being taught, too
The only examples of this that I know of are literal holocaust deniers. I have never seen a professor with an argument that can be backed up with any amount of facts be disciplined.
I say batshit insane crazy stuff all the time that in hind-sight I didn't mean at all. Probably, I should work on thinking more before I speak. But - I like to speak my mind - even if it gets me in trouble some times.
I do think it's a problem that a lot of employees can and do get fired over saying dumb stuff - a lot of times that they didn't mean to say. Does this include Trump's famous "Grab them by the p#$$y" comment? Maybe.
However, there's this idea that people should basically be able to send out hate speech memos in a company and not be apprehended for "speaking their mind". These are completely different. One of them is premeditated idiocracy. The other is a mistake. We shouldn't confuse the two.
I agree that education has changed for the worse in many ways, but might disagree with you on some of the specifics. Being direct, I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc.
>I see the republican party as having a very anti-science, anti-evidence, anti-facts disposition as evidenced by their attitudes toward evolution, gun-violence, COVID, etc.
One of my hobbies puts me among people who pretty homogeneously lean right. They say more or less the exact same thing about the left and on the same list of topics no less. I can paraphrase talking points if you would like. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference in beliefs between the left and the right when it comes to the what is right and what is wrong.
I think if you expanded your list of issues slightly you would be very hard pressed to find someone who is not a hardcore partisan from either party that does not believe that the "other party" has it right on at least one or two issues.
I think this exposes some of the problem we're discussing though. Your view that one party is anti-evidence, anti-facts, anti-science betrays enormous bias or at least indicates that your information stream is very biased. There are plenty of examples of policy proposals from either party that can be described this way. Facts and evidence are conveniently ignored in the furtherance of policy, routinely. To say that this party or that party is _mostly_ unlike the other in this respect is itself "anti-evidence" or contrary to the objective evidence.
If people are not equipped to deal with opposing viewpoints and critical thought, then perhaps the social organs of education have failed.
Yes, arguably because certain political elements have made it their business to make damned sure those organs fail.
When educated people consistently vote for one party over the other, it's absurd to expect the losing party to support improvements to education. You'd have to be, well, poorly educated to think that.
If I were to guess, it seems pubic policy in recent decades has often been founded on shaky ground. Anti-communism, anti-drug policy, various health/welfare policies, and so on are often not particularly evidence based. I can see this leading to a broader acceptance of dual-reality "facts" like we're seeing now. Words and truth lose meaning.
Yes. We had free speech but we weren't prepared for unedited, viral free speech. We weren't prepared for cameras in every ordinary person's hands. We also weren't prepared for our free speech to be archived and searchable forever.
I think it's easy to blame the symptoms of social media for the issues we have. But the internet, video quality bandwidth, smartphones, and social media together have combined to dramatically change who publishes and who finds it over the last 10-15 years.
In my mind, it is going to take us time to adapt, maybe a couple generations. Things will be difficult during that time but I hope we don't make regressive changes in our values based on what is fundamentally (in my opinion) an issue adapting our approach to free speech to the rapid advancement of publishing technology.
EDIT: "most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable" -> This is the kind of dramatic conclusion I don't think we should be drawing.
A diverse information diet is a great thing, but you need the context and tools for understanding what you read. That means you need to understand math, science, history, social science, etc. at a somewhat advanced level to make sense of these things.
America has been good at free speech, and we should never give that up. But for free speech to result in advancement of society, rather than goons storming the Capitol, a good education is an absolute requirement, and the government has not given all Americans the opportunity to get a good education. There will be pressure to censor speech because people aren't equipped to process it -- we should resist that and focus on education instead. This is where we should be spending our money; this is what the government exists to do. Give everyone an equal standing to understand these sources of information. We're not doing that, and the results are bad.
An educated populace is also the most dangerous thing to anyone in power (politicians, business operators, etc.). Even without being a coordinated conspiracy, that is a constant force working against improved education.
You don't even have to postulate education being dangerous to people in power (something that I personally find to be more conspiracy than not).
It's enough to notice that there's near zero economic incentives for providing actual education. The market settled on an equilibrium of baseline operational knowledge + filtering through standardized testing, and then advanced operational knowledge acquired through voluntary higher education and on the job. And it continued to optimize accordingly. The only thing that makes people try to teach beyond this minimum is humanistic values, belief in importance of education. Against it works the entire economy, forcing individual teachers and schools alike to find savings, "cut out fat", make lean.
Free market is enough to explain the disaster education is becoming worldwide (because it's not just an US phenomenon; we start to see the same problems over here in Europe).
Putting it even more directly - the inevitable outcome of free markets without any competing benign feedback loops is fascism.
So you (hypothetically, as a developer) make six figures? Superb.
How valuable is that when your country goes down in flames because it's easy to make money out of people who believe Bill Gates is seeding Covid via 5G towers?
> How valuable is that when your country goes down in flames because it's easy to make money out of people who believe Bill Gates is seeding Covid via 5G towers?
That's what I keep telling people around me. They're still bewildered that I don't go out of my way to "optimize" my way out of taxes, or that I'm in favor for raising the taxes for my income bracket. And it doesn't even take a civil war - as the income inequality progresses, how long will it take before your close family will start asking you (the hypothetical rich developer) for help? Will you turn them away, to enjoy your six figures in peace?
> as the income inequality progresses, how long will it take before your close family will start asking you (the hypothetical rich developer) for help?
and how much help will you be able to offer, given your prior lack of optimization for this very scenario?
> Will you turn them away, to enjoy your six figures in peace?
"I gave already, it was taken out of my income before I had a chance to spend it, go away now"
It's not about free market in education itself, but about everywhere else.
Teachers are overworked and underpaid, they can't afford to go far beyond what curriculum says they should. Parents demand schools prepare kids well for their adult life - which for almost all families means primarily preparing for a decent job. Thus the labor market is indirectly but strongly influencing the curriculum. Labor market demands a way to sort people, so standardized testing and pressure to choose your career at even earlier ages appears. On the other side, governments are embedded in the market reality, they need to manage their budgets and seek savings, so their prioritize, tightening the school system to provide what the market demands.
I could go on and draw some other feedback loops. But the point is that you can't disentangle schooling - or anything government - from the economic reality, and that this economic reality is sufficient in explaining the shape of education system. No conspiracy, or ill will by any rich and powerful agents needed.
> Teachers are overworked and underpaid, they can't afford to go far beyond what curriculum says they should. Parents demand schools prepare kids well for their adult life - which for almost all families means primarily preparing for a decent job. Thus the labor market is indirectly but strongly influencing the curriculum. Labor market demands a way to sort people, so standardized testing and pressure to choose your career at even earlier ages appears. On the other side, governments are embedded in the market reality, they need to manage their budgets and seek savings, so their prioritize, tightening the school system to provide what the market demands.
If there's no slack in the system then how do you propose to expand the scope of function provided by a system running at its limitations?
> I could go on and draw some other feedback loops. But the point is that you can't disentangle schooling - or anything government - from the economic reality, and that this economic reality is sufficient in explaining the shape of education system. No conspiracy, or ill will by any rich and powerful agents needed.
I agree with this, which is why I questioned you. A free market in education would do a lot to empower educators to offer real, functioning education because they'd be able to charge what they needed and compensate their teachers appropriately.
> If there's no slack in the system then how do you propose to expand the scope of function provided by a system running at its limitations?
I don't. I do think that adding slack into the system is an important step in fixing educaction. But my comment was trying to point towards the question of how come there's no slack in the system? What ate it? Answer: market pressures. Not some elites thinking a dumber populace is easier to control and wishing a weaker educational system into existence.
> A free market in education would do a lot to empower educators to offer real, functioning education because they'd be able to charge what they needed and compensate their teachers appropriately.
I'm not disagreeing completely, but I have many concerns about this view. Free market is good at optimizing for behaviors that yield immediate, short-term profit. Good education is very hard to price, with profits following the actions by many decades. I fully expect that making education governed by the market directly would make it settle on even stranger proxies in lieu of delivering proper education. On top of that, free market for commodity labor doesn't equal happy labor, but rather unhappy labor living on minimum wage.
> how come there's no slack in the system? What ate it?
The lack of market pressure allowed the quantity of unnecessary/unwanted services to expand as the quality decreased (because people are still forced to pay for a failing educational system, bad teachers are shielded from accountability, and anyone who wants to pay for private education must pay twice).
> Answer: market pressures.
If you don't respond to the market telling you that you cost too much and provide too little, you shouldn't be surprised when you're unable to produce what you consume on the market and become dependent on additional assistance.
> Not some elites thinking a dumber populace is easier to control and wishing a weaker educational system into existence.
Can you provide some source substantiating your denial of this historical assertion?
> Free market is good at optimizing for behaviors that yield immediate, short-term profit. Good education is very hard to price, with profits following the actions by many decades.
Free market is also good at optimizing for means of production that deliver commodities and goods over the long term. The limitation is that the owner of the capital must have a long term vision he wishes to accomplish with his capital. Coercive systems decouple the vision-seer from the capital-owner by permitting the vision-seer to realize his vision by expropriating the necessary resources from individuals who do not share that vision. This replaces the impediment of needing a coincidence of capital and vision with the perverse incentives and moral hazards associated with expropriation.
> I fully expect that making education governed by the market directly would make it settle on even stranger proxies in lieu of delivering proper education.
Only as far as the people paying for the education approved those proxy results.
> free market for commodity labor doesn't equal happy labor, but rather unhappy labor living on minimum wage.
a free market wouldn't have a minimum wage by definition.
It's not that people are unable to understand, it's that understanding isn't part of the game. It's about group membership and a lot of that is about knowing the "phrases" that make you seem like a member.
Easy bad ideas make for catchy phrases. The kinds of thoughts that are spreading across the US today would have been stopped by editorial accountability in an earlier era. I'm not sure education is the way to reduce the impact of easy bad ideas, because group members take on the catch phrases without thinking them through.
And back in the 1500s anyone could build a printer and rags for paper and crank out hundreds of broadsheets or pamphlets to be distributed all over town. Which lead to pulp fiction, the open exchange of ideas and the religious wars of the 1500s and onwards.
Open exchange of ideas is not new. It's just faster and cheaper now.
The point is that it was a step function. The bar suddenly dropped a huge amount. It went from "mostly just the church can produce written works" to "anyone who can afford the people to run a printing press can produce written works". It was a massive shock to the system.
> I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.
Sophisticated people are just as prone to bias and cognitive error as unsophisticated people. The danger with limiting the spread of information is that the task of deciding what to censor is vulnerable to corruption by the interests of the censor.
This is supposed to be why we have a republic rather than a radicle democracy.
People forget, statistically half the population has an IQ below 100. And importantly, to be absolutely clear, that does not mean those people should not have a voice, or that they are “stupid”, far from it. It does however mean that certain issues are overwhelming complex to assume every American can make competent decisions on. Many of these rioters I’m sure don’t grasp how the very system they are protesting works on a fundamental level. If they believe the earth is flat, how can we expect them to understand the electoral college process, or the role of state versus federal government in our election process.
Certainly everyone’s voices need to be heard. When people and their families are struggling, many of them doing the jobs that make this country function, they are ignored. So when a savior seems to come before them, we need to be very vigilant.
We’ve seen these things happen before in history with other demagogues.
We expect in this country that all voices should be heard in order to elect people who’s job it is to lead. That’s the definition of a republic. That leadership should have killed the conspiracies and falsehoods from the start, protecting those of the democracy who are vulnerable, many of them suffering from the consequences of this pandemic.
Instead they sat on their hands. We need to hold our leaders responsible. We need to ask, en masse, for those leaders to hold each other accountable.
We also need to take ownership as a people. Us. We consume this media. We have created these social media companies, and allowed them to spread this stuff. Ultimately each and every one of us is responsible.
Let’s make sure going forward we ask more for those we ask to lead in our stead. Our vote isn’t the only thing we have to do that. We also have our voice and our 1st amendment. Let’s use it to the fullest.
I think you are wrong. While the cost of authoring and distributing content are cheaper than ever and anyone can broadcast to the planet trivially, the ability to actually bring attention to your content has never been more scarce. It is deeply controlled and manipulated by huge confirmation-bias-as-service platforms in every recommender system, personalized ad system, and content feed across the mainstream internet.
Your fellow citizens deserve more credit. They have brains. They really can and almost always do form adequate understanding of reasonable takes on new information.
But when their eyeballs are subjected to consumerist bidding wars and ranking algorithms to inflame, to stoke fear and insecurity, to render feelings of inadequacy, and they are so thoroughly manipulated, then you get information monoculture.
We need information diversity and information vitamins. Instead we’re allowing ourselves to be spoonfed information junk food.
I don't think that's true either. Before, bringing attention to your content required first getting the attention of some huge media organization, then piggybacking off. At the end of the day there's still only as much attention as there are people attending, but the barriers to entry are far lower today.
Meanwhile, our fellow citizens deserve no credit at all, and neither do we. No one has any real idea what's going on, we just either follow the herd or totally gamble. Even if someone was actually able to be correct about complex systems, it would be unverifiable.
The president's own information diet is often fueled from said blogs though. These conspiracy theories definitely weren't given to him by some intelligence agency or election official, so where do you think he got them from? He regularly retweets and repeats talking points created in the deepest parts of the internet.
> These conspiracy theories definitely weren't given to him by some intelligence agency or election official
Do you have a source for this comment? I'm pretty sure he heard about the allegations of fraud from actual purported witnesses who filed sworn affidavits. Those blogs that you're saying he gets the information from have hyperlinks to the documents filed by his legal team. I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around.
Which are not intelligence agencies nor election officials. Anyone can sign an affidavit, it's not some magical paper.
If intelligence services or elections officials had found something, they would've announced it officially, instead they have announced the opposite. [0] [1]
> I'm thinking the blogs got it from him, not the other way around.
Trump is regularly retweeting information that has no other source or basis than theories created in the deep bowels of the internet. [2] (and hundreds more)
> Which are not intelligence agencies nor election officials. Anyone can sign an affidavit, it's not some magical paper.
They are poll workers who claim (under penalty of perjury) to have witnessed illegal or election-tampering conduct.
> Trump is regularly retweeting information that has no other source or basis than theories created in the deep bowels of the internet.
Its presumptuous for you to pretend to know the sources available to POTUS.
>> There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.
This from the guy who was fired because he continued to claim there was no evidence when people were presenting evidence of election tampering and begging the government to investigate before the evidence trail grew cold.
He said it multiple times this morning on The Ellipse, before he instructed his supporters to go to the capitol.
He has tweeted today his displeasure at Mike Pence if he doesn't reject the Electoral College votes.
And he has tweeted moments ago, yet again, that he won in a landslide and that he and his supporters have had the election win viciously stripped away from them.
Whether it's delusional or some malicious intent to incite violence, I think doesn't even matter. He should be impeached, removed from office, and banned from ever holding office again. The priority must be, counting the state certified Electoral College votes, and certifying the result. Following that, Congress could impeach and remove Trump from office in half a day, if they want. Their normal speed is glacial, but that's institutional momentum. They can move very quickly, if they want to, they just usually don't want to.
What? “Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.” Do you realize how elitist and even authoritarian that statement is.
Being reasonable is time consuming, expensive, requires constant education and a mind open to accepting that being wrong is ok. It’s elitist almost by definition. I don’t see how you got authoritarian in the equation, though.
The very notion of putting people in the category of sophisticated and unsophisticated, is a form of classism. It gets into the realm of authoritarianism when we start wanting people to be making decisions for others based on this. This not something we should be doing in a free society.
I don't think it's classist to acknowledge that a lot of people do not have the privilege or time to thoroughly investigate the accuracy and biases of the information they are receiving.
The response to this should be to ensure everyone does have the education and free time to be able to deal with this type of misinformation, but that runs contrary to the goals of those who benefit from the status quo.
Not if it is accompanied with a simultaneous desire offer the populace the tools to become more savvy at understanding the world around them with an education in history, politics, economics, ethics, science, etc.
It isn’t about information diversity. Diversity is sought to counteract the real problem, which is that news isn’t news. It’s entertainment. Journalism no longer presents fact. They present an interpretation of facts, ostensibly spun and sensationalized toward the ideology of their viewers. 30 years ago this didn’t happen. You could watch any of the nightly news shows and walk away more or less with the same understanding of current affairs. That’s not true anymore. Why did this happen? Because infotainment generates more viewers and therefore more ad revenue. It’s also a means for politicians to galvanize the electorate and stir up hysteria to their benefit.
Yes. And a large chunk of population simply aligns based on emotion and do not have the desire to learn. This applies to all categories of people, including myself.
I agree with the first paragraph, but strongly disagree with the second.
Those regimes that filtered information very narrowly constrained ideas to align with the status quo. That was sometimes good, but often held back people with minority views from finding and organizing with each other. Progressive social movements and positive new possibilities have come out of this, in addition to reactionary ones.
What we do have to do is figure out how to have a shared view of the world that is less authoritarian than in the past. People now try to get the private platforms to enforce particular viewpoints through deplatforming and such. I am sympathetic to this as a practical matter, but don't think it is a viable long-term solution, as it will just lead us back to where we were, except with different people calling the shots.
I think there’s a difference between diverse information being available, and people actually being exposed yo diverse viewpoints. With engagement driven social media more people than ever have a voice, but individuals are also fed a custom tuned diet of only a narrow range of views.
If you go looking for different opinions you can find them, but most people don’t do that. They let an algorithm generate their opinions for them by excluding anything that might challenge their views from their feed.
With every new communication medium comes new responsibility.
When radio was first introduced, it was rife with misinformation and false advertising. One Dr. Brinkly made a fortune selling fake goat testicle transplants (for treating ED) over the radio, only to relocate it to the Mexican border when he was shut down. He made so much money that he ran for Governor and received 30% of the vote.
We're kind of in the same place right now, but with a much broader medium. How we move forward is anyone's guess.
> Twenty years ago we had far less diverse access to information.
Yes. And thirty or forty or fifty years ago (remember the Internet itself is more than 20 years old), we had even less diverse access.
However, that does not mean the information we got back then was more reliable than the information we get now. It just means it was harder back then for we the people to spot when we were being misinformed, lied to, or just plain not told about things we should have been told about.
People back then could print anything. We have more population of people in the country, more then ever - and more outlets but it does not change how information is disseminated
- from Thomas Paine Common Sense, to getting all the farmers with pitchfolks to revolt over whiskey tax to the newspaper boy shouting on the corner.
Half of the population has a below-average IQ. Maybe 10% of those with an above average IQ are Dark Triad personalities somewhere on the toxic spectrum between narcissism and sociopathy.
Economic values operate to reward them, and to punish - or at least inconvenience - those with less toxic values. So naturally the Dark Triad types have a very strong incentive to exploit the below-average. And the more below average and cognitively unsophisticated they are, the easier it is to exploit them.
This isn't even about Left vs Right. It's about how you design a political and economic system that can handle these challenges without imploding.
A lot of this stuff comes via talk radio, not twitter or YouTube, and that's not exactly new technology.
I think you're confusing cause and effect. The problem is that people don't trust the same "professionals" to "filter" their news. People trusted Cronkite. There wasn't a huge market for "here's the news Cronkite won't tell you." Even when the country got super divided during Vietnam.
Now, I don't know why people have lost faith in professionals. I have my theory, which is that there has been a really significant ideological divergence between the professional class and ordinary people.
Let me give you an example. I don't want to litigate the specific example, but I'm just using it to illustrate. I read a lot of Matt Yglesias. He's very smart. But as far as I can tell, he doesn't believe in culture. Like, he doesn't believe it exists. He doesn't understand why people are attached to theirs. So when he talks about immigration, he draws these dichotomies "well there is the economic aspect of the immigration debate, then the xenophobia aspect."
I come from a country where a bunch of brown Muslims declared independence from other brown Muslims over the particular Indo-Aryan language they spoke. Bangladeshis would flip out if, for example, a quarter of the country was suddenly Pakistani. Not because they dislike Pakistanis. (I.e. Xenophobia.) But they are very attached to their own culture and don't want anyone to come and change it. One of the most powerful forces in the world is peoples' attachment to soil, language, religion, and shared food, history, art, customs, etc. Yglesias boils all of that down to "xenophobia."
Now, I'm quite the opposite. I get sad I'm going to die 10,000 miles away from where my ancestors are buried. I'm a bit jealous that my wife's family all lives within 2 hours of where they came over to Oregon on the wagon trains 170 years ago, while mine is scattered around the world in a diaspora. So when I listen to Yglesias, I cringe at some of his takes. I trust him because I've read a lot of his work, but I don't think he understands me or people like me. I can just imagine someone who don't want to put in the effort tuning him out.
The professional class is increasingly full of people like Matt Yglesias. Not just "liberal" in terms of supporting this healthcare policy or that one. Or in thinking the Vietnam was was a bad idea. But "liberal" in terms of not sharing a lot of basic premises with ordinary people, like “is it legitimate to be concerned about culture changing in your community.” It’s very hard for people who don’t share those views on basic things like that to talk to each other productively. I think that's a huge part of eroding trust in professionals.
I enjoyed reading this. But I'm confused. You posit Yglesias as a member of "the professional class", which you contrast with "ordinary people", and in particular, people like yourself.
But in your profile here on HN, you describe yourself as:
> I'm an appellate lawyer. In a past life, I was an engineer at a cognitive radio startup.
I'm puzzled at why you see the distinction as having anything to do with "the professional class".
I think the word you could have used to good effect here is "cosmopolitan". Its meaning is a subtle and probably used a little differently by different people, but I take it to describe a person somewhat like myself who (unlike you) doesn't have much of an attachment to "soil, language, religion, and shared food, history, art, customs", but instead sees all of the culture of humanity as their birthright, and who feels free to pick and choose (subject to certain political and economic constraints). I find it personally important to me to be able to combine things I love from different cultures from all over the world, and I confess that I regard those with a strong attachment to whatever they perceive as "their culture" as somehow a little (or a lot!) backwards. I also confess to a genuine irritation with anyone who expresses ideas that suggest that certain culture is "owned" by specific groups of people.
Clearly, we have quite different views of the world and our place in it. But I'm still confused why you put Yglesias and his cosmopolitan views in "the professional class" when it seems (from your being here on HN as well as your profile) that you are also a member of this class. Surely Yglesias is just a cosmopolitan sort of person, and you are not?
If so, it's really about "the professional class" vs "ordinary people", it's about people (like me) who view cosmopolitanism as central to the great hope for a peaceful and prosperous future for humanity, and people (perhaps such as yourself) who feel that belonging to a particular culture (and place?) is central their identity and presumably their conceptions of the future.
> I'm puzzled at why you see the distinction as having anything to do with "the professional class".
I think the word you could have used to good effect here is "cosmopolitan".
Let me make clear that I’m not making value judgments here. Obviously I have my views, but I’m just trying to describe what I’m experiencing.
Putting that aside, I agree “cosmopolitan” describes aspects of this as well. But economic trends have caused the professional class to become much more cosmopolitan than it used to be. In the law, for example, it used to be most companies used local or regional firms. Today, stuff is increasingly consolidated in NY/DC/SF. The same is true of the news media, etc. As a result, these industries are increasingly filled with people who were okay moving halfway across the country to pursue opportunities. And the process of moving itself reduces some of those traditional attachments to place.
This is happening internationally. Surveys show that the vast majority of people in Asia wouldn’t immigrate to another country even if they had the chance. So places like Silicon Valley are increasingly filled with people who are a little different than the normal person in the country they left behind.
As for me, I came to DC at age 5 with my parents so it’s not like I had much of a choice. And it’s hard to be “from” DC since everyone here is so transient. Even then, I moved back when my wife and I had kids and we live 10 minutes from my parents.
> Surely Yglesias is just a cosmopolitan sort of person, and you are not?
Yes, I think that’s true. But as explained above, there are a lot more cosmopolitans in my profession than the average place. The median American lives less than 18 miles from their mom. The median American lawyer or journalist certainly doesn’t. I remember scrambling to get a passport when my boss decided we were going to Germany with two days notice. My passport had been expired for years.
> Who feel that belonging to a particular culture (and place?) is central their identity and presumably their conceptions of the future.
And just happiness. I don’t mind if my kids go out somewhere else for college, but I want them to come back to Maryland and raise kids. I travel for work, and my wife and I like to go to random Midwestern cities once a year for vacation, and I really love Japan, but traveling for the sake of it doesn’t do much for me.
Cosmopolitanism is one aspect of how the professional class is different. Religion is another. There are more religious people than you’d think in the professional class, but everyone keeps it pretty DL and churchgoing isn’t a typical weekly activity. Education is obviously another, and that’s got a lot of knock-on effects. I’ve been trying to explain the new meaning of the term “racism” to my dad and he’s pretty perplexed. He never went to college in the US, and prides himself on “not being a hyphenated American.”
For the most part, people can just sort into the kind of life they want. But when the media becomes highly nationalized, it becomes a challenge. I’m politically a pretty liberal person (I was a Democrat most of my adult life) and it’s just hard for me to read mainstream news these days. I stick to Bloomberg which tends to be pretty neutral. I have to admit, I read foxnews.com or WSJ when 10 years ago I would’ve read the NYT. Not because I think “these people are bad” or anything like that, I just don’t want to fight with the impedance mismatch to see what happened in the GA election.
Notably, the local news doesn’t create this tension. The Capital Gazette here in Annapolis doesn’t make me want to flip to Fox.
So I guess the Biharis are what, chopped liver? You should remember that Mujib ended his famous speech with Joy Bangla, joy Pakistan but the last part gets left out.
Maybe I’m understating the actual xenophobia towards Pakistanis in Bangladesh. I’m (inadvertently) rather ignorant some of these things because my knowledge is second hand through family. My parents were strongly pro-independence, and my uncle was in the army.
I think a lot of HN readers who are fairly sophisticated forget that half of the world is not. Diverse information diets are not a good thing, because most people are not equipped to understand what is reasonable.