Back in the mid 90's as the Internet was starting to become more accessible to the general public, I remember reading an article that made the following point:
The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone moved to newspapers to printed national and global news. That was bad b/c it lowered the options people had for consuming news and dramatically reduced the diversity of ideas and opinions. The Internet was going to do the same to the point that we all read the same big websites and therefore had the same thoughts, opinions etc. <end of the point>
I remember reading this and thinking "that kind of makes sense". Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. It's not surprising that we've become so divided when you can "build" your own reality by choosing the information streams that you want to consume.
PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today.
The "customized feed for you" is not as unique as you'd expect. It basically is the algorithm fitting you into some number of buckets and then serving you that content.
In fact, the "customized feed for you" does one thing really well. It treats you exactly like it learned to treat someone "like you" from the past. So what it really does is regurgitate an old, stale, pattern. In some sense, it prevents you from finding new experiences, keeping society frozen in time, repeating the behavior sequences of those before them, the pioneers and trailblazers that define the relationships early.
The other thing algorithmic feeds, and even some sites like buzzfeed do, is generate strings of nonsense. This isnt quite a new phenomenon, but started in the 80s with MTV. "Whereas variety shows and televised concerts in the 1960s and 70s provided context and structure to the music they presented, MTV instead gave viewers a rapid succession of wildly different sounds and visual accompaniments to those sounds, without any logic connecting one video to another."
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used... Compare America's funniest home videos, with a host, callbacks, and even a basic narrative structure to tiktok. At least Tiktok accomplishes SOME of the culture missing from prior products on the market in the last decade by inviting people to remix videos with the same audio.
> So what it really does is regurgitate an old, stale, pattern. In some sense, it prevents you from finding new experiences, keeping society frozen in time, repeating the behavior sequences of those before them, the pioneers and trailblazers that define the relationships early.
The part about keeping society frozen in time is contradictory to the rest of the text.
It's leading people on to the extreme end, so a conspiracy theorist will become even more of one etc. A frozen society would be unchanging... But it does change as extreme ideas spread like never before.
Right, the brain seems to have a heuristic that if it hears/sees/etc the same thing, it makes it believe it more. Like if you’ve heard two different people spout the same wrong thing, you’re quite likely to start believing it. So if you’re fed the same thing over and over due to your YouTube persona bucket, you probably become a more devout believer, for better or worse. Receiving a smattering of different opinions probably keeps you in a better place in terms of remaining critical. Maybe staying in a skeptical frame of mind helps inoculate against this somewhat, because you go through the exercise of trying to find counter evidence at the same time, so that you’re essentially feeding your own brain conflicting messages. But that takes effort unless you’re already in the habit.
Something to keep in mind, regardless of how correct you think your habitual info channels are. If dissent is stamped out, like it is on many subreddits and Twitter, that’s a pretty bad sign.
That's a good point - we have to be confronted with opinions we don't agree with such that we maintain our mental muscles for reasoning about why some ideas are wrong/bad. Otherwise if we're only fed a stream of things we agree with, that can be used to smuggle in bad/wrong ideas without our knowing it or having much ability to confront it. Not to mention that every once in a while you're confronted with some challenging ideas that compel a change in worldview in a positive way!
> So what it really does is regurgitate an old, stale, pattern. In some sense, it prevents you from finding new experiences, keeping society frozen in time, repeating the behavior sequences of those before them, the pioneers and trailblazers that define the relationships early.
That would be true if the catalog of material to watch/listen/read remained static. But it does not. Nobody 10 years ago who was into music theory/practice would have seen Rick Beato's videos, or 12 Tone's. And things are different because those channels exist (and will presumably be different in another N years because of a different set of people producing new material).
The article is about more than youtube. The algorithms that balance the stock market, everyones 401ks, that predict repeat offenders in the criminal system. Stability, the kind that these systems attempt to create, is an equilibrium of unchanging nothingness. Change by definition is unstable.
While billions might watch a video on YouTube, it's not truly a shared experience unless it happens at the same time. And at least for me, even with live chat scrolling in the speed of light to the side, it still doesn't feel the same as "Live TV" did. But as I commented elsewhere in the discussion, I still prefer the current experience.
I understand where you are coming from but something about it doesn't seem quite right. I remember watching footage of 9/11 on the news while the event was happening. A Gen Z-er watching the same footage on YouTube could be said to have shared the same experience under your stance, but I feel like most people would disagree. I picked a significant world event as my example, but I could also see this applied to culturally relevant memes from the past.
I think live news events aren't a great example for this sort of thing. The experience of watching 9/11 live was that we didn't know what the hell was going on or what the aftermath would look like (a big terrorist in America was sort of unthinkable, after all). Knowing what the outcomes would be totally changes the experience.
A big terrorist attack wasn't particularly unthinkable. The WTC had been attacked before. We had the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people. There were the 1998 Embassy bombings in Africa and Clinton's 1998 bombing of the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan because of Al Qaida ties (and lots of comparisons to "Wag the Dog" due to the Lewinsky scandal, it was all over the news).
The fact that the WTC just wasn't there any more and someone had ran a plane into the Pentagon was the actual definition of shocking (as opposed to the Millennial definition of shocking which gets used for everything down to stubbing your toe on the coffee table). It wasn't all that surprising that we'd been attacked though and it was pretty obvious who did it, in real time. It was also obvious that we'd dive into bloodthirsty wars in the Middle East, and plenty of us protested the 2003 Iraq War on the streets, to no effect. The country wasn't really all that "unified". A bunch of people in the middle who didn't pay any attention to events did suddenly have one rammed into their face and they all jumped in the same direction and mindlessly rallied behind the flag in a way that led to disastrous wars in the Middle East. That isn't something to look back on with fond remembrance. We were predictably fucking idiots and ignored the people who bothered to point out the hazards of our actions. Stop being nostalgic about that.
Not only had the WTC previously been bombed, it was the same group who did it! Their goal to destroy that particular symbol of American commerce wasn't exactly secret.
The success of the plan is what's shocking. The visual symbol had a jarring effect that allowed the narrative of unity to prevail temporarily. The parallels to Pearl Harbor are deep.
For a more cultural example, I don't think today's teenagers would captivated by watching the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show in the same way as those who did back when it aired. Not just because they have already heard the songs, but because what it means to listen to music as an adolescent has changed so much. Watching people perform rock music on television isn't special, and songs about wanting to kiss and hold hands aren't considered risqué.
Not to offend, but there are plenty of these sorts of live cultural experiences for Gen Z that maybe you aren’t aware of and captivate millions of young audiences. Kissing and holding hands in the 60s seems like an artifact of a decade of undoing centuries of Christian religious repression in the west. You’re right that rock and roll is not novel anymore. Things change.
Twitch live streamers share experiences with tens or hundreds of thousands of folks. For example, I can guarantee any millions of young kids who played Fortnite learned about the musician Travis Scott through that.
Perhaps the era of mass media where 10-50+ million all tuned in at once is over, but there’s plenty of music and media that captivates many millions for live events.
Not knowing what is going to happen is exactly the thing. When people watched the moon landing, or a shuttle launch, they shared the anticipation, tension and hope. Anything could go wrong at any time, and sometimes it did. Watching something that is happening right now feels like it has more weight to it.
Watching something like this after the fact you most likely already know what's going to happen and it will not have the same emotional impact. Plus, whatever the outcome is, it's in the past.
Someone brought 9/11 as an example and that's definitely a good one. You can watch the videos online and feel grief, anger, sorrow. But you already know it happened. You will never watch this footage thinking this can't be real, this isn't happening. You will never have that sobering experience after the fact since you now live in a reality where it already occurred.
But did Baby Shark examine how America views war and its effects on the people who were not just in combat but trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction it produced? MASH was one of the first prime time TV shows that made people think about the cost of war and its ramification to society.
As someone who has no kids, I haven't seen Baby Shark, so maybe it does that too.
Your comment made me laugh, but seriously, Baby Shark succeeded because of the platform it was on, and how little kids today are virtually glued to that platform. I wouldn't really compare the two, let alone Baby Shark has almost nothing to do with a live shared experience, but also it's just a different product altogether. It's like comparing MASH to Coca Cola, sure more people will be able to recall Coca Cola over MASH, but that doesn't really say anything I suppose.
The cultural worth of mash is immaterial to whether or not it has comparable reach to baby shark (i.e. whether or not baby shark is a “shared experience”).
It does raise the question of whether or not the shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos that make up our "shared experiences" today are comparable to the shared experiences of the past which typically conveyed more depth, information, and meaning.
Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online - it would be disingenuous to write off the entirety of modern popular culture as "shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos." What we lack isn't depth, information and meaning but the power of a unified pop-cultural zeitgeist created by having cultural expression gatekept and controlled by a few broadcasters and media conglomerates.
If you want to know examine how America views war and its effects on the people who were not just in combat but trying to pick up the pieces of the destruction it produced, you have options beyond the blind, scheduled consumption of a single sitcom, however well written.
I do have to wonder how much of that is due to fake accounts.
I was looking over Wikipedia's lists of most watched youtube videos and wondered the same thing there. Lots of them are music videos and I'm sure recording companies are inflating the views to some extent, especially early in.
Fake accounts or no, its hard to find opinions among even smaller bloggers who don't at least tacitly kowtow whatever is debated among the major players in media at the time. You see it even on HN too, with certain regular 'major' storylines finding their way into the frontpage time and time again. We are only ever exposed to a limited set of opinions that fall within a range considered acceptable, given the incentive structures of media.
> Of course, there are plenty of worthwhile cultural expressions online
this is true, but none of those are getting tens of billions of views. What spreads the farthest and the fastest are memes and quick hits of dopamine and rage. Those are what comprise our most shared experiences today. I think we'd agree that it's better to not be limited to only those things that have been curated for us by broadcasters and media conglomerates, but between our natural tendency to seek and spread low effort content and the curation of algorithmic gatekeepers optimizing to exploit that tendency our most seen and shared media typically ends up being far more shallow than it used to be.
A few generations ago the most 'viewed video' was mankind's first steps on the moon, an incredible feat of science and engineering that ignited their imaginations. Today ours is Baby Shark.
Comparing numbers between television in the 1960s and modern internet multimedia and then extrapolating that to a comparison of relative cultural impact is disingenuous. Baby Shark is only as viewed as it is because it's an easy way for people to distract their kids.
I don't agree that shared media experiences typically carried more depth and meaning pre-internet than today. You're picking out exceptions to the norm, but the mainstream is always mediocre. Most people weren't watching intellectually stimulating, complex, thought provoking works of art or listening to symphonies - people who watched television were literally referred to as "couch potatoes."
And if there were an event comparable to the Moon landing in cultural import (the closest I can think of in modern memory is COVID) it would of course be all over the internet, rather than localized on a single platform, to be compared to viewing on a single television channel.
> It does raise the question of whether or not the shallow memes and 2 minute youtube videos that make up our "shared experiences" today are comparable to the shared experiences of the past which typically conveyed more depth, information, and meaning.
I don't really think they are comparable in any meaningful way. To bring any comparison we would try to make a little more towards apples-to-apples, let's just consider the subject of war. On one side, let's take the entirety of the MASH run, 250-odd episodes, and on take a handful of 2 minute compilations from the war in Ukraine. IMO more depth, info and meaning about war is more easily accessible from the meme-videos; It's impossible not to be viscerally affected when you watch a grenade drop a couple hundred feet onto some poor bastard below. MASH have may moments like "Keep that damn chicken quiet!" but it just isn't the same, nor as true.
Out of curiosity, when you wonder about "comparability" in this context, what metrics of qualities are you thinking about including in the comparison?
Yeah, bubble called having children. There is not a single child in my daughter class that do not know this song by heart. And I'm sure that it's not like they learned it by randomly surfing web on their own - their parents introduced it to them. It's really bad song but still its good that it provides some shared context for each and every one of them.
The YouTube algorithm won’t take long to serve it up if a viewer spends any amount of time watching programming for small children. It takes some time training the account that you don’t want anything related to baby shark to ever be suggested.
Knowing that perhaps our best example of "unifying culture", something that has been watched an incredible 11 billion times, is a cartoon song where 80+ percent of the words are "doo" repeated over and over...
It's still more unique than anything before as long as the number of buckets is larger than the number of available TV channels was a few decades ago or the number of available newspapers was a century ago.
Also, one point is that those algorithms operate on global scale. Even if there are a million other people who are in the same bucket as you are, they mostly don't live in your close proximity and you might never meet any of them in person. It's no wonder we feel isolated and lonely.
Are there "11 billion" views just like there are "about n million results" on the Google search page? I wonder how real that number is.
Anyway, that is a sidetrack; I agree with the rest of your point. Seeing the garbage that recommendation algorithms serve me is proof enough that they are not successfully crafting a unique experience just for me but instead putting me in some heap based on what they mistakenly think they know about me.
I call them propaganda streams, I share a similar bucket with my friend and it's interesting discussion the subtle tangents it takes us on - some days it will try get you mad about some world event, then some it will decide action sports is the go. I wonder how many other people are in the same streams watching the same suggested content thinking the same thoughts given to us, unlikely to ever go outside long enough to meet.
Before the telegram news was predominantly local news and only major news from abroad since it took so long to travel. The telegram made all news globally, instantly available and we were suddenly inundated with information that for the most part we couldn't really act on and had a strong incentive to be as sensational and attention grabbing as possible.
Newer media like the radio, television and the internet only accelerated this trend.
We do all go to the same ~10 websites. There are some geographic differences, different sites dominate in different parts of the world. America has an outsized influence that may slowly be slipping.
What you couldn’t predict 20 years ago is that those 10 websites are going to have ~personalized feeds for everyone. That was a little surprising … although we’ve been talking about the problem of filter bubbles since at least the mid 2000’s. I remember telling my boss in high school that I’m going to quit so I can go build a Google that doesn’t suffer from the filter bubble problem. Ah youth …
Despite all this personalization, a collective conscience remains. Largely influenced by bot armies and professional memers. Look how effectively the news spreads when an american politician does anything. Especially around election season. The whole world knows and can’t get away.
And we all know that GOT had a bad ending even if we stopped watching the show after 1 season, for example.
>Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted.
Is that the opposite? If the customized feeds are selected from the same group of sources, we could still see a decrease in total number of sources even though people are more customized.
Here is a simplified example. Take the 50 US states. In the past, let's assume each state had 10 news sources. Generally people would only consume 10 news sources so the overlap of source consumption in each state was pretty similar. A person in a single state consumed the same 10 news sources as anyone else in that state. Total sources of news is 500.
Then we enter a globalization time. Everyone gets 10 news sources, but they are custom picked for each person. But there is now 1 source per state they are picked form. This gives us (50!/(40!10!) ~ 10 billion, assuming I remember my math correctly) combinations for 10 news sources, plenty enough that each person gets a custom selection of news sources. But the total sources of news is only 50, 1/10th of the previous example. So while each selection is more unique, the total number of captured thoughts and opinions is now 1/10th of what previously existed.
The situation is more complex than that, I think. It's possible for some domains to diversity while others homogenize (and I think you are overestimating the diversity of views actually in play). American politics is highly polarized rather than diverse. The mass media are owned by a few large corporations while the internet offers the possibility for greater diversity of views. But possibility does not necessarily translate into actuality. Dethroning a king doesn't automatically mean more liberty. Indeed, the removal of an authority creates a vacuum in which powerful players can now even more successfully dominate than before. Information travels very quickly today, but it must happen over a medium and "signal strength" still matters. Indeed, this speed of transmission can be a force multiplier, inviting less reflection and criticism and more thoughtless reaction.
We must view things systemically. The world today isn't the world of 2001 plus some new stuff, like Lego bricks tacked onto an existing edifice that otherwise remains the same. New things shape the world they enter into. Once the internet, social media, etc. entered the picture, they also affected everybody and thus the system as a whole, adapting and changing in response. It is true that the establishment can no longer exercise control over popular thought and sentiment using the exactly same traditional 20th century methods of broadcasting propaganda thought restricted channels, but new methods exist. And it's important to understand that today as well as decades ago, the less powerful often ape the more powerful. Chomsky talks about this in "Manufacturing Consent". There's your trickle down theory of propaganda.
So I'm of the opinion that things are changing, the pot is being stirred and bubbling, but there's a great deal that remains the same under new guises.
I used to think that it would be hard to imagine a time where 120 million people watched the same thing at the same time. And then I realized that's an outdated thinking. Here's my example:
There are certain ads that get played on campaigns. It's a longer time scale - not everyone is tuning in at the same time. But I've been able to communicated shared suffering over Forward ads to other people that I've met. If I like a similar topic to someone else and we both watch Youtube, then I guarantee they've seen (and hate) the "Toxic Poop Guy".
Instantaneous watching was the past. Experiencing the campaign is the now, in my opinion.
Sure, maybe not 120 Million people at the same time for a TV show. But it's definitely still out there.
> PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today.
The Super Bowl numbers will blow your mind then ;)
I should have clarified that I meant SCRIPTED mass media events.
This was based off the idea in the article that reality is a constructed game.
It's also funny that you mention this b/c when I usually mention the MASH story in person, I also share that the other events of that magnitude are usually Super Bowl/World Cup etc. Guess it slipped my mind this time.
For it’s time (meaning relative to the US population at that point) MASH is larger than basically every superbowl ever, except for maybe the last couple. I’m not hip on the current viewership numbers, but literally over half of America watched the series finale of MASH
Having a show become a massive TV event (like MASH) is nice for solidarity but it comes at a price of having a centralized channel(s) of opinions, messages and agenda. It's a double edged sword but eventually, in my opinion, having a variety of messages available is better than traditional centralized TV. And massive TV events can still happen for something like the next moon landing or sports.
The problem isn't with selecting your content, but with the reduced (to none existing) exposure to other content that might challenge your views. We owe it to ourselves to honestly test our beliefs and worldview, see if they hold up, and adjust accordingly. Today it's far too easy to avoid doing this while staying on feeds that reinforce whatever it is you believe in, never challenging you, and becoming radicalized.
> but with the reduced (to none existing) exposure to other content that might challenge your views. We owe it to ourselves to honestly test our beliefs and worldview, see if they hold up, and adjust accordingly.
This sounds good but I actually don’t buy it anymore. I consider myself to be a pretty empathetic person, but over time I’ve realized empathy doesn’t solve any problems unless you’re forced to put your money where your mouth is. Would I work together with a far right conservative on a project towards a shared mission. Of course! Do I understand why conservatives feel the way they do? For the most part yes. But being exposed to far right beliefs just makes me more and more crazy, even if I understand the underlying emotion. Even if I empathize with the underlying pain, sometimes empathy makes those feelings worse.
We don’t just disagree on the substance of opinions( pro choice vs pro life) we disagree on the deeper ways of expression, emotion, thought processes and how we assess truth. I understand why someone is pro life but watching the thought processes behind those rants? Helps no one.
Sure I love reading a good relatively moderate economist from either side arguing whatever but /r/conservative comment section and caustic twitter threads?
> being exposed to far right beliefs just makes me more and more crazy
> watching the thought processes behind those rants
I think, perhaps, the problem stems from only paying attention to people who are making emotional arguments based on ideology or repeated talking points that they don't truly understand but simply feel align with whatever group they see themselves as belonging to. This is the partisanship or tribalism that seems to be poisoning a lot of public discourse. I specifically say discourse here because I don't believe it is actually disrupting society at the interpersonal level as much as popular opinion seems to think it is.
With either side, if you examine the well reasoned arguments that underly a lot of the talking points you find that they are often quite different and more nuanced than the things firebrands are turning them into. This is troubling because it means even the people who supposedly believe in these ideas actually don't understand them at all. I think this is responsible for the phenomenon of people turning out to be over all much more centrist and agreeing with each other when they make an effort to sit down and discuss these things in a rational manner.
My advice is to shun reddit, YouTube and twitter and instead find some old books that discuss the topics in a rational way from a variety of perspectives, read them and then draw your own conclusions.
Yeah You’re totally not wrong, I just had a reaction to the oft mentioned on the media pop psychology version of “get out of your bubbles” that is too abstract for most people to act on.
I would argue that him not liking far right people is a good outcome rather then bad one. Him becoming far right too would be the worst outcome possible.
Because then far right would become bigger and that is catastrophic for their targets. Far right has victims, a lot of them.
Becoming friendly with far right by moving closer and closer to them while ignoring victims is wrong strategy.
There's really very little difference between far left and far right. They're both radical extremes that allow no diversity of thought and that demand unquestioning allegiance to the tribe. Contrary to popular sentiment (or media narratives) they will both resort to verbal and physical violence in support of their views. The only real difference is their opinion of government. Leftist want a total nanny state, far right-wingers want anarchy -- until one of them actually takes power. Then they both take the form of a dictatorship in some form.
Unfortunately, in today's atmosphere (and the sentiment in your comment seems to betray this), people on the left view anyone who's actually a moderate or even slightly right-of-center as "far right".
>his sounds good but I actually don’t buy it anymore. I consider myself to be a pretty empathetic person, but over time I’ve realized empathy doesn’t solve any problems unless you’re forced to put your money where your mouth is
Exactly. Modern society suffers from a dearth of people being forced to practice what they preach because everyone is happy to look the other way when someone in their tribe is a hypocrite.
I don't think "both sides are the same" is accurate, so allow me to push back. One party ousted a leading politician because he violated their ethical code. [1] The other party stands by its leading politician even as said person violates national security. [2] In the former case it's very unlikely the policitian will ever become a presidential candidate. In the later case it's very likely he will. Both sides are not reacting to violations of their values in the same way.
I'm sure there are cases of hypocracy on both sides, but one side at least attempts to condemn gross violations.
With the advent of the internet, one can pick and choose copious examples to cast either political party as hypocrites. This is because political parties are formed of lots of people, and most of their leaders will not live by their claimed prinicples (because lying and signalling is a much easier path to winning elections than living by principles).
I cannot emphasize enough how much both parties are corrupted by this. Both parties are beholden to corporate funding, and to the groupthink of their elite friends whose problems and concerns are not representative of Americans.
And the Republican leadership will have secret affairs and secret abortions, while the Democratic leadership will send their children to private schools (or the public schools of exculsive enclaves), while the former preach about the sanctity of life and marriage, and the later preach about the importance of diversity and public education.
In response to "Don't do the 'both sides' thing", with a clear and humongous example of the difference between the sides, you... do the "both sides" thing.
The problem with your example is that
1] actually happened.
2] is a media/political fabrication being proven in a court of law at this very moment.
And to the point of this article, and many comments here, the news is much more homogenized than people think, because I'm quite sure you've heard no factual coverage of the latter from ANY pundit who sits in front of a TV camera.
Well in one way it did work with the original point, the internet has created a centralized pipe for X. There exists not _many youtubes_ there is _one youtube_ and everyone uses that for video.
In the beginning of the internet there were _many_ options, but overtime all of these options get cannabalized by a central _service_ for that thing.
So yes and yes, which is arguably the closest thing to a matrix, simulacrum view of reality. On top of that we rely ever increasingly on models and statistics as physical laws. Oh woe to the future, for the difference between fact or fiction is irrelevant and blurred.
A teenager in my family says that all the kids in her high school have suspiciously similar senses of humor, as though that part of all of them was raised in the same environment; TikTok
> Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted.
Reality is even worse than that, what you actually get is an unholy marriage of both. A highly customised feed built out of content plucked from a small number of highly homogenised sources.
And it's larger than that. A lot of sentiment floating around is about how things should fit 'me' perfectly. There's an inversion of the "force" of society because we can all try to fulfill our apparent needs without anybody.
media has also become asynchronous, and streaming has made a metric like live audience lose some of its meaning and should be replaced with launch week or month views?
Maybe it is not the "building your own reality" which is the problem but the idea of nation states in which you have to be in a particular reality without a say.
It is probably better for humans to live in smaller structures over which they have more control.
Concerning the division between liberals and concervatives in the States I think it is interesting to mention that Theodore Kaczynsky has written that the opposing evolution of these two systems(with the money a power they have) may lead to a larger conflict than other systems like Islam. He calls them self-propagating systems which are somewhat organisms on a higher level controlling more or less nodes, which are human brains(and machines nowadays).
Oh my god, the endless lamentation about the fracturing into infinitesmall “filter bubbles” (pukes) while in reality there is mainly the binary “red vs. blue team”, “Reps and Dems used to be able to attend family dinners but now they cannot”.
Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Do you like cats or dogs? Pepsi?
Or Coke?
So thirty years ago you were apolitical, sat in front of the TV, and didn’t take things so personally. Now you are pseudo-political (Culture Wars), sat in front of YouTube, and identify with nonsense. No change of major consequence has happened.
The TV was already The Matrix, you fool. Now you complain that at least you used to share one common Matrix instead of Red Matrix and Blue Matrix—at least we could all agree on what veal tasted like (which didn’t really exist) sighs
"Those who have studied the past should not be surprised. The most contested subjects in human history have arguably not been land or fortunes, but symbols, ideas, beliefs, and possibilities" I read a lot of history and I'm quite sure it was mostly about land
For example, I'm from Israel. Two hundred hundred moons ago, I was involved in a civil peace initiative. The point was for citizens to discuss this unofficial peace document so that it could form the basis of an official one at some point... Peace agreements are "war by other means" par excellence.
Anyway... this conflict is most definitely about land. What made this specific initiative ballsy was the fact that it included maps and took on land issues directly. This also meant that only extreme peaceniks from either side would go anywhere near the project.
What where our discussions about? Narratives. What were our disagreements about? Narratives. What compromises did we fail to make? Narratives. What happened. What it means. What proverbial schoolchildren should be taught. What symbolic steps must be taken to in recognition of the correct narrative.
BTW... active fighters were involved in this initiative. Israeli soldiers and palestinian militants. A lot of them. They even had their own groups. Disavowing violence was not a precondition to participating. Disavowing violence rarely came up as a demand or request by participants. People could, often, understand and live with past and future violence. Disavowing narratives and symbolism was constantly demanded as a precondition to everything.
Hostile, competing narratives and symbols are a deep essense of conflict. They aren't just caused by conflict. They don't just cause conflict. They are conflict.
I'm also irish, and the story of northern ireland is also proof of this idea.
I said mostly. We will find a lot of examples following this ideas, narratives, symbols the author mentiones in modern time but also earlier (30years war, crusades etc.). But until the industrial evolution, state income was basically taxes on land(in coin but also in big part in kind) and this was mostly fought over. I don't disagree with you, I just think the author has the balance the wrong way around
The Israeli conflict is only about land by default. Because if one or the other gives up, they have nowhere to live. Everything else is money and the stories we tell ourselves and they tell themselves around procuring more of it. Money and power.
If you put the existential threat part aside (which we should have after +70 years with all of our neighbors having fractured countries) the Israeli/Palestinian story is as pathetic as it gets being solely a money and power grab. And to think we still sends our sons and daughters to die for said grabbers of money and power under the guise of symbolism and idealism speaking it as we’re still a fresh new country.
It's also about politicians and people in power, staying in power by keeping conflicts alive. For example, Netanyahu regularly bombing some important Hamas person in Gaza and Hamas then firing rockets, was good for Netanyahu's and the Hamas leaders' popularity (as far as I've understood).
> only about land by default
Hmm, I think to a somewhat large part, the conflicts are ways for the people in power to stay in power.
What do you mean with "by default"?
Have a look at The Dictators Handbok btw and try to see the world from the perspective of someone like Netanyahu or the Hamas leaders. How can they increase/keep their power and wealth, using the conflicts as tools.
It's also tribalism ... Many things at the same time going on?
I think we are saying the same here. Yes it’s 100% about keeping the conflict alive and thereby keeping your reins on power.
By default I mean that before modern times, in the past, when the country was young it was about survival and hence about land and all the ideology and history stories we had around it. But those times have passed. Today we are a power house in the Middle East to be reckoned with. For now almost the last country standing with a functioning (funny I know) government in the area. We are not fighting for land. Our neighbors are powerless to give us another 1973. And yet we cling to the same stories and send our sons and daughters to do the dirty deeds of our (and their) politicians so they could keep their reins on power.
The marketplace of ideas is won not by conflict but by merit. In other words you can’t force people to have a narrative about something, you have to provide the superior narrative. The issue we’re facing right now, globally, is the inability to debate ideas on their merits. The microcosm of that can be seen in your peace talks example; the other side is trying to force their narrative onto the opposing side. That’s not how debates work.
Is the current Russo-Ukrainian war about ideology or about land? With the same facts, you could analyze it as both. Arguing for land, it's clear that Russia wants control of Ukrainian land, not least Crimea (which hosts Russia's main Black Sea naval base), but also as much of Ukraine it can get its hands on (see the recent decision to annex every oblast Russia was occupying). But you could also argue that it's about ideology: resisting NATO encroachment on Russia, or Russia's denial of the existence of Ukrainians who aren't "really" Russians, or general east-versus-west/democracy-versus-autocracy/etc. ideologies.
This is about a war that is currently ongoing, where even lay people are likely to be cognizant of the various causes and theories of the war. Applying this same analysis for wars that happened 500 years ago is more difficult, especially since knowledge of the particulars is likely to be filtered via people who favor one theory over another.
FWIW, I'm generally in the camp that most wars are waged for the primary purpose of controlling more land, with the reason for doing so largely boiling down to some form of "naked territorial aggression"--including the current Russo-Ukrainian War as well as recent conflicts like the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.
That one was just a lie. It has zero to do with nato.
It is ideologically against westernization of countries around Russia against their souverenity and for making them authoritarian puppet states responding to Kremlin.
But encroachment by NATO thing is nonsense. It frames Russia as vicrim od nato, but that is not what it in reality was. Even nato enlarging was because countries actively seemed membership, pushed pleaded pressed. Because they have seen nato as only available protection.
Sorry I don't comment on Russo-Ukrainian war online as I want to avoid to get the discussion into a flamewar.
"Applying this same analysis for wars that happened 500 years ago is more difficult" Yes it is and there a still colored discussions about this e.g. consider the Roman expansion in into Greece. There is a camp which argues it was (initally) a defensive move to counter a pact between Macedonia and Selecuid kingdom against Egypt (Green at al), which would distribute the power in eastern Mediterranean against Rome. The other side argues Rome was just build to expand endlessly and it was aggressive move. Here I'm slightly on the first side, as I think Rome wanted to consolidate after the Punic Wars. But after the inital wars the following wars were clearly landgrabs, which provided with Rome with rich areable land in the east.
Anyway I argue, to wage war up until to modern times you needed control land as this paid your military, in rome were talking about 50% of state income, most from landtax. And this created the initative to wage war of said reason (we are getting into interstate anarchy theory see. e.g. Eckstein or Waltz).
1) We maintain our current diversity of thought, race, views, and all other things - but we have an infinite and homogeneous world that stretches out, in identical fashion, in every direction endlessly.
2) We have the world the same as we're in, but everybody is literally identical. To the point that we're effectively 8 billion twins with an identical upbringing.
---
In which scenario do you think there would be less war? To me this feels nearly like a rhetorical question, but it may well be that we simply see things very differently!
ok i guess I'll have to admit/adress some errors in this case.
1. Malthus is still cited(and applies I think) a lot in historical papers when discussing preindustrial societies and that was the mindset I was in when I wrote the comment.
2. I didn't really consider "endless" in the scenario present. In an endless world you you' ll get infinite wars. Whereas in an finite world you get finite wars so the "endless" we world will always more wars then the finite.
This is pretty meandering, and some parts are quite good.
However... I feel like this relies on a narrow perspective of the past. Did people's belief systems not work this way in the past? I mean, the social internet is new, and that changes things, but what's our baseline?
Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs. A lot of the emotion, tension and conflict that results from a church schism is similar to the political schisms cited here. Religion also sometimes encourages "alternate reality games" as described here. Find clues in scripture, the flight of birds or whatnot. See a deeper reality than all those fools. Religious devotees alway "produce and consume game materiel" in much the same way.
Your chances of convincing a MAGA, BLM or any other modern political devotee to reform might seem slim... but they're much better than with religion. In fact, they usually fizzle out naturally while religious beliefs are very resilient.
Anyway, my point isn't to bash religion, it's to say that maybe this is all just normal human behavior. Maybe the TV era was the unusual phenomenon. Maybe we're not all supposed to believe the same things.
I remember pre-internet, and it was hard to find communities of people who deviated from societal norms. If you strongly believed in something that was way off from what society beloved or accepted, you were alone and your drive for that topic probably fizzled out after a while.
It was also hard to reinforce your belief system if CBS, ABC and NBC didn't share your views.
Now, in Internet-world, you can instantly get connected with like minded folks and have your beliefs accepted, which probably reinforces your stance even more.
So I guess the baseline is, back in the pre-Facebook days, there were just less people on the fringe.
> Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs
I would say the opposite is true. Over time the number of religions in the world has become less - larger and larger groups uniting under fewer and fewer religions.
The same is true for cultures, languages, ideologies, etc. They are all just variations of imagined stories. The world is united to a degree never seen before in history.
However I think perhaps society saw peak unification in the 90's and maybe 00's. It seems society is re-fracturing into smaller groups again. It is perhaps remarkable that we had such a level of unification for as long as we did, and there is no reason to believe society will ever return to that state.
>Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs. A lot of the emotion, tension and conflict that results from a church schism
Usually it was the opposite: emotion, tension and conflict for political and national/group interest reasons, were translated into church language.
That's why the religion divisions were seldom, if ever, within the same demographic, but between groups that already had historical grievances or were beginning to have something to divide (as nations, classes, cultural groups, private interests, and so on).
Of course it's never 100% clean, as there would also be a feedback loop - but the underlying cause were almost always some interest, not theological.
The problem is not that to some "reality is a game", but there are a lot of people that have given up on independently verifying information they get. There always were people like that. People that feel happy offloading their thinking process to others. Whatever others think is truth to them. I suspect in the old times those "others" were primarily friends and family, perhaps "talking heads" on TV. That was not great, but not hugely problematic. Today, for many people, their opinions are shaped by various selection of: media that always wants to drive engagement up(every story is an outrage), various commercial interest groups, foreign hostile psy-ops, domestic trolls, various genuinely troubled people. All those things masquerade as "friends" in our "customised" feed being very effective in convincing large groups of people of their bull**.
Unfortunately, this may be a genuine barrier to further technological advancement of human race. If the majority of us can't tell what's real (often not because of inability, but because of mental laziness) how can we increase our connectedness even more? (with neural implants or other future gadgets).
Correct. This fact is well known and exploited by those with the means and interest to reach a political goal, accrue wealth, and gain or stay in power, i.e. corporations, governments and advertisers. The internet is a playground for this crowd, and they couldn't have asked for a better tool.
It's incredibly ironic that the same adtech and social media built by western societies, sources of so much pride and prosperity, is legally and knowingly used by both internal and external enemies to influence their governments in any way they please, without leaving any trace of who did it, or what they exactly did to begin with, since it happens on long timescales with millions of small "attacks". It's the ultimate weapon.
As to how we get out of it? It's difficult putting the genie back in the bottle now. We can educate people about critical thinking and disinformation, but that will only reach those who are open to hear it. We can regulate social media platforms, but we run into a few problems: a) governments have no idea how they work or how to even begin enforcing regulation, b) corporations will never agree to self-regulate since it directly impacts their growth interests, and c) even if they do agree, it's an incredibly difficult technical challenge.
I think the solution lies somewhere involving all of the above. I think we all have to live with this now, as it's only going to get worse before, and if, it gets better.
There's another way to look at this. My father, talking about growing up in the rust belt, told me how utterly bland and stifling he found the media environment in which he grew up. Paul McCartney and Skynyrd and mindlessly predictable TV plots and that was all there was. I'm almost certain he would have been an entirely different person if he grew up somewhere with more of a punk scene or proper folk tradition. The crushing conformity of the past, I think, is difficult to imagine. Sure, people can gravitate to 10 or so sites if they choose, but there is legitimately a whole world at your fingertips for you to explore.
And yet, the past seemed to spring forth subcultures with distinct and durable lifestyles/aesthetics/belief systems. Now - it feels as if everything is contemporary and everything is transitory.
One thing I think the article maybe misses. I love playing Civilization but when I play, I rarely win militarily, or in fact, at all. Instead I just build up and up and up until my winning feels like a foregone conclusion and then I quit and start a new game. Building up and up and up is fun. But actually building a huge military and marching it through my enemies and taking over is really slow and kind of a slog actually.
I see a similar dynamic going on online, over on twitter and stuff. I think many people think those people who enter their online filter bubbles and rarely leave do so because they know their worldview is fragile or they're afraid to be proven wrong or whatever but actually it's primarily just that being inside the filter bubble and slowly building an argument that you just know will crush your enemies is really fun and actually leaving the bubble to go do that crushing isn't that fun, it's kind of a slog actually.
Anyways it points to at least one technological mitigating factor, which is that the engagement with those opposite you needs to be gamified in a similar way to make it more appealing to more people. Going on twitter or reddit and openly disagreeing with someone inside their bubble means I'm likely to soon be arguing with about 12 different people who all disagree with me, often in different ways (very unfair/unfun to fight on a dozen fronts) or going 30 comments deep with someone (you can never actually win so there is no reward.) I think technology has found a lot of easy wins in creating engagement by building bubbles but all the things we really want to do with those bubbles - merge them, pop them, slowly dissipate them, transplant them, etc. still remain unsolved problems.
And since the article asked: 1. T 2. T 3. F 4. F 5. IDK/C 6. F 7. F
The answer to all of the questions is: "Who the f* knows and why should I care?".
The problem is people are concerning themselves, committing huge parts of their cognitive abilities, to topics that are completely irrelevant to them. The media (traditional and social) bombards us with a constant stream of new issues every day. However knowing about or forming a opinion about these things is pointless for the individual.
You might as well form strong opinions about the latest Star Wars movie and go rant about it, it'll have just about the same impact on your life.
This would be sound advice, were it not for the fact that you could be going along minding your own business and someone else decides to make you a prop in their opinion theater.
This sentiment is one point the author forgot to mention.
What will be the concequence of 'Reality is just a game now?": Political Apathy.
"Who the f* knows and why should I care?" is the only way to ensure harmonious counion with those around you.
How do you know when a republic is in it's death throes? when " knowing about or forming a opinion about these things is pointless for the individual.".
History has showed us that a disinterested populace leads to economic stagnation and political consolidation.
Unfortunately political apathy is no longer an option. "Silence is Violence", and you will be forced into taking a side, even if you are just trying to dine outside in a restaurant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxjJPZF4P_s
Some of it will eventually impact you. I have a relative who lost her job because she wouldn’t take the Covid vaccine. She worked remotely for a state government, was in her 20s, and did not have in person interactions with people. She was offered the opportunity to take a lower position with less pay that would require her to work in person with people, but she wouldn’t need to be vaccinated per govt requirements. She declined.
At what point do we care? Who needs to be impacted before it’s important?
I actually struggle with this because my inclination is not to care at all. Just leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone and we can all live together. But in practice, in reality, it doesn’t work like that.
The game is you're expected to arrive at the most extreme political ideology so you can to remain relevant on social media...?
Seriously though, I sent the article to my Dad as he seems to believe everything is a conspiracy theory; the EU is a German project to win the Second World War (I know), climate change is made up by governments for some reasons and a plucky band of fossil fuel companies and right wing bloggers have uncovered the truth, the war in Ukraine is The West trying to sell arms and it's their fault for inviting Ukraine into NATO (which hasn't happened AFAIK?)... you get the idea.
We live in a time described excellently by the article even if you are not the target of it's point, the fact that this conspiracy-theory-isation of society exists and an extremely high percentage of people seems to be playing it to some extent.
Conspiracy-theory-isation exists because people resent being told what they are supposed to believe by an authority they do not trust. I'm personally very opposed to forcing them to trust, to ramming the truth down their throat. Instead what I would prefer is that these people are given the tools to find the truth on their own. Simple tools that can be trusted just because they are simple, that do what they are supposed to, no more no less.
They could be technological, software, or maybe even something as simple as teaching people about rhetoric and how to manipulate people so that they can detect other people doing it. Teaching people about logic and fallacies. Teaching people how to infer motives.
> I'm personally very opposed to forcing them to trust, to ramming the truth down their throat. Instead what I would prefer is that these people are given the tools to find the truth on their own.
But they think they've already done this. They used the Tools That The Ivory Tower Elites Hate like YouTube and Facebook, found the extreme crackpot content, and convinced themselves that with these tools they have finally found the truth that those nasty authority figures have been trying to hide from them!
> Conspiracy-theory-isation exists because people resent being told what they are supposed to believe by an authority they do not trust.
I keep hearing this theory, but it just begs the question: how are these people deciding which sources to trust? What makes them trust Fox News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Alex Jones rather than other "mainstream" news?
Somehow, I don't think the problem is a lack of tools. Something deeper is going on.
> I keep hearing this theory, but it just begs the question: how are these people deciding which sources to trust? What makes them trust Fox News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Alex Jones rather than other "mainstream" news?
Abstractly, the same way ~everyone does: heuristics, confirmation bias, post-hoc rationalization, etc. On a relative scale, some people's methodologies are better than others (often much better), but on an absolute scale they are almost all bad.
If unpopular opinion X turned out to be reality, early adopters/investors would come out ahead of skeptics - think how ridiculous quotes from internet nay-sayers now appear.
If you can make your opinion reality, by either persuading or bullying people into accepting it, you don't need to trust it - you can just choose it and act accordingly. Politics is just religion without the anthropomorphism. Societies and civilizations need to be rational all the way down, just as people are not creatures of pure logic.
People always want explanations to things we simply don’t have good answers, maybe because we don’t have the information or because there is money to made selling macho pills online or just because a people don’t want to face reality. It is fundamentally a form of escapism that I think am we are all by default detectives in a thought game trying to find proof of diets that will make us live longer or find the true reason global warming is happening is sunspot activity.
> I'm personally very opposed to forcing them to trust, to ramming the truth down their throat.
They may feel no such scruples about doing so to you, though. Reciprocity is a good heuristic for many social situations, but when it goes wrong, it can go really wrong.
These kind of people say that the "tools" you suggest we give them are actually just attempts by the Illuminati to keep them down. At a certain point, they just refused reality, and instead insist they know more than you.
Plz tell your dad if he ever wants to grab a non-alcoholic beer and vent about you, I'm down.
I'm kidding of course. He and I would be able to talk for days about other things, though. You and I, true to the OP, would probably rate each other not worth each other's time after 5 seconds. This is the inoculation I spoke of in my other comment. It's a powerful mechanism.
"Do you know who owns and controls the station you're watching? Does the truth you know rely on its funding? Does it matter? DOES IT MATTER?!?" --kmfdm
You’re not kidding are you. I think you’ve misunderstood the point of the article and started playing the game it talks about in the comments. Well played.
I know a lot of crazy conservatives who believe a lot of crazy things. They are almost all older.
They also all have these stories of genuinely crazy, but factually true, things that eroded their trust in institutions and consensus narrative over the past several decades or more. So their bar has been lowered to the point that conspiracy theories seem more likely than not.
As I get older, I can see reality hammering on my bar, pushing it lower.
I completely agree, which is why it was so frustrating seeing people speaking with such total conviction on things like the lab leak theory or the Rittenhouse trial.
I wish "I'm not sure yet, we'll have to wait and see" was a more normalized answer to questions like "how do you feel about _____?"
The important questions are down. Those are just examples to frame the discussion into something real, instead of letting it float as abstract concepts.
Reality is the objective truth. Perception is out individual mental models of reality, built up by our own past experiences and our limited information set.
Edit - I think this is actually a very important distinction to make. There IS an objective set of facts that can answer these questions definitively. And we need to remember that. By conflating terms like “reality” and “truth” with ideas of mental models and perception (or even using phrases like “my reality”), we’re already giving up before the game is even played. Reality and truth are must be defined as the objective, omniscient state, even if it is practically unknowable. They must be defined this way because we must acknowledge that those states exist at all so we can strive to get as close to them as possible. If we cease to acknowledge there is a real, objective truth, then everything is arbitrary and unmoored - we’re lost at sea with no bearing and no direction.
I do agree with the general premise of the piece, however - that perceptions of reality in society have been weaponized and manipulated on an industrial scale. But it’s super super important not to lose the idea that “reality” exists.
But reality is not “the objective truth.” The notion of ‘truth’ belongs to the conceptual framework of knowledge (and the very complex process of its acquisition), and, unless you yourself conflate the mental image with reality, you realize that the objective, material world as such does not have to contain true or false statements about itself.
> The notion of ‘truth’ belongs to the conceptual framework of knowledge
Or, as I believe the OP is trying to point out, truth is what is. Just because people used to believe that maggots spontaneously generated doesn't mean it was true. The knowledge was false because the reality did not behave in accordance with the supposed knowledge.
> you realize that the objective, material world as such does not have to contain true or false statements about itself.
It does though. Gravity is stable on earth for the foreseeable future. Therefore, if I jump off a cliff, I will fall. This is true. It doesn't matter what flawed knowledge I gather that says otherwise, that would conflict with the reality. Reality is truth. The material world consists of truth simply by existing, and falsehoods arise when people try to conform reality to an idea that is wrong.
In the gravity example, you have a clear way to make a prediction and test it. The concept of gravity can clearly map via perception to reality, and thus the truth.
Most of the questions in this article given as examples of massive disagreements however are not like this. They hinge on interpreting the definitions of concepts we have invented that do not map so clearly to reality. The debate is often entirely over the definitions of the concepts themselves, not over reality or truth. It is more about language than physics.
> Or, as I believe the OP is trying to point out, truth is what is. Just because people used to believe that maggots spontaneously generated doesn't mean it was true. The knowledge was false because the reality did not behave in accordance with the supposed knowledge.
This is problematic for a few reasons I can see:
1) we often do not have access to 'what is' (and worse: sometimes we do not or can not realize it)
2) because of the ~"cultural unacceptability) of (1), we often define truth ~"colloquially", or by 'consensus' (although, it isn't necessarily actually based on consensus), and the public is often not notified
3) A philosophical definition of Truth is typically Justified True Belief, and the True part is often taken for granted (because of (1), or otherwise) as True (or is colloquial/consensus 'Truth') while people are focused on the Justified part
4) There is Objective Truth and Perceptual Truth (which can be planted), and as the saying goes: Perception is Reality
5) For certain topics, many people seem to lack the ability to desire to know what is True (typically: matters of War, Gender, Religion, Sexuality, Morals, Operating Systems, etc etc etc)
6) Linguistics, semantics, semiotics, etc - there is an infinite amount of complexity across the entire pipeline
>> you realize that the objective, material world as such does not have to contain true or false statements about itself.
> It does though. Gravity is stable on earth for the foreseeable future. Therefore, if I jump off a cliff, I will fall. This is true. It doesn't matter what flawed knowledge I gather that says otherwise, that would conflict with the reality.
Speaking of (6) above: the claim was "does not have to", and you rejected it with a single instance of a single scenario where a true statement is possible (it is not possible in all scenarios) - one experiment can disprove a theory, but one experiment cannot absolutely confirm a theory is true. And this is on Hacker News, which is populated by genuinely smart people.
> Reality is truth.
Portions of it are, but far from all of it is. Consider the beliefs of Trump supporters, conspiracy theorists, etc - these are a part of reality...the beliefs may not be True, but they are Real...and, they can exert a force that is both Real and True (despite what underlies being only Real). Thus, the (seemingly) unreal/untrue has a way of "seeping/morphing" into Reality, and Truth (in a sense).
> The material world consists of truth simply by existing, and falsehoods arise when people try to conform reality to an idea that is wrong.
Material/physical reality is only a portion of the whole: there is also metaphysical reality.
There is an objective truth for the physical reality of things, but that truth immediately gets murkier as you step away from physics or into more abstract concepts. It is important to establish that objective truth is out there, but it is not sufficient, as many of these questions (from the article) can't be directly answered by reality:
"Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese laboratory." is something that could be answered by reality one way or another, with a hypothetical perfect observer. A single fact could answer this question.
"Climate change demands a radical transformation of modern lifestyles." This question is about the future, rather than the past, so it depends on our ability to assess the truth about predictions of objective reality, rather than merely to analyze objective reality directly. Reality can help us build better predictive models, but it can't decisively say if this statement is true or not. You could say that the future is part of the objective reality, but here we are forbidden from being able to perceive it at all.
Finally, "Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to get elected." This one concerns only past events, it could definitely be resolved with knowledge about some specific fact from objective reality. However, in the absence of such a fact appearing we are forced to make decisions about the intents of people to make a judgement. I have trouble with the idea that this could be mapped directly to objective reality, ie something like collusion is an objective state of the brain that could be perfectly classified in theory. I think that our concept of "collusion" here is the problem-- it is simply not well defined enough to be used in a way that is not fraught with disagreement. Put another way, it is entirely possible that perfect observers of Trump and Putin would not agree with each other on this question, and that is a problem.
To summarize, objective reality is important, it really exists and can of course be used to find the truth in many ways. But we are stuck with concepts that are not part of objective reality, when those concepts show up in questions, objective reality might not be of much help.
Your last point resonates with me. In objective reality, Donald Trump publicly asked Russia to hack Clinton's emails. I'm told this could be evidence of collusion or a joke, and honestly that does track because I often have trouble telling if reality is just an elaborate prank on me.
Sensory pathways in the brain must reinforce engrams more effectively than thought patterns. In other words, if you read or hear a message through your senses, that fixes the neural pathways triggered by this stimulus more firmly than had you just been ruminating on the topic.
At least, that's my theory as to why the internet has increased polarization. People have always been able to think in odd ways, but the negative reinforcement from a conforming outside culture suppressed these thought patterns.
The internet gives your brain external stimuli that validate your thoughts, and this causes your brain structure to change moreso than had your thoughts not been reinforced.
The inability to communicate between those on opposite sides of society's divisions is not just a failure of imagination. In some cases the brain circuitry of the interlocutors is so different that being subjected to the same stimulus leads to wildly different responses and consensus is impossible without one or both parties altering their brain structure through sensory counter programming.
The biggest lie media has sold us is that the "bigger reality" is more important.
This is going to be extremely controversial to people that live on the internet like you and I, but what is actually important to you is what's in a one mile range from your current location, your family and your house.
It's culturally accepted that being "cultured" to be interested in what's happening in the other side of the world, but it is not important as in vital for your well being and immediate survival.
So, no. The local is what is more important, the rest is what makes us buy newspapers, TVs and radios. News is an product.
I would not be surprised at all of the average American doesn't know the names of their neighbors, but can rattle off large numbers of "world figures" who basically have zero impact on them, and they certainly have zero impact on.
Unfortunately, this IS some people's jobs, certainly the San Francisco Fed president reports on financial conditions conditions across the west, including LA, and Portland...
The problem is that your little local world is part of the bigger world and that world can affect you and your local world far more than you can affect it. Its like the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. They'd like to stay in their cozy world of the Shire and ignore the rest of the world, but the rest of the world won't ignore the Shire.
The key is to just focus on what is going to actually relevant to you. You should always ask yourself, how does this piece of information affect me? Most of the time though the news being peddalled by major media and other sources with a lot of views has no effect on my life. Go ahead and skim a major national news site and try to find something that will be relevant to you. It's hard. I couldn't do it when I tested with the cnn homepage just now, or some of the larger reddit news subreddits' first 25 posts. At that point all that information is trivia, but its held to such importance that you'd think you were doing an injustice not keeping up with it.
Peddling is selling, with connotations of small-scale, bargaining / dickering / haggling, and often ambulatory; latterly with additional abstract connotations of spreading (for free, so without the haggling) more or less suspicious theories and opinions.
4) Don't know what this means. What is the "American Project"?
5) Vague; is the assertion that the allegations were lies or the conclusions?
6) Very unlikely but I haven't looked at the data
7) His actions led to deaths, and none of the people that died deserved death for anything they did, so yes he did something wrong
I feel like these are just kind of common sense opinions? None of my answers to these questions feel partisan, at least not to me.
I definitely have different ways of determining truth than many other people, I suppose. I am absolutely certain, for example, that none of the creation myths or supernatural dieties that we have invented are real in any measurable way. I am pretty sure that most of the stories in, for example, the Bible were always meant to be read as metaphorical anyway. But the vast majority of the human race apparently disagrees with me on that, which blows my mind. How can they not see something so plainly obvious? It shouldn't even be a serious question. How do you deal with the fact that the majority of your fellow humans believe things that are obviously silly? I apparently just don't understand what normal people are doing when they say they are thinking. So the whole Qanon thing is on one level pretty much what you would expect from a species like us, and on another level it's still utterly baffling.
> I feel like these are just kind of common sense opinions?
The difference is that you've answered every question as a probability of some unknown, which is just not something that most people do.
> I am pretty sure that most of the stories in, for example, the Bible were always meant to be read as metaphorical anyway.
That seems like a hot take. The bible being intended to be metaphorical seems unlikely. Especially given how much of it is just a straight historical log of things that happened. The stories were certainly embellished to convey certain takeaways, but it seems unlikely that you as the consumer were supposed to read past the embellishment. Retconning interpretations of things to be figurative because they no longer hold up against irrefutable science these days doesn't mean the text was intended to be figurative.
Well, I don't know for sure that I'm right about that. But: take the garden of eden story. It's a metaphor for coming of age. They realize they are naked. They are expelled from the garden (childhood) and must go out into the world where they face toil and hardship. They eat the forbidden fruit (sex). I think it's pretty clearly a parable.
Take Noah's ark. Noah plans and looks towards the future and toils when everyone else is being lazy and is therefore safe when everyone else gets drowned, despite being laughed at and dismissed. It's a similar story to the grasshopper and the ant. Seems like a parable to me.
If you're out hunting in the middle east for an apple core or scouting mount ararat for mummified timbers, or trying to add up how many days ago was the exact day of creation, you're clearly missing the point of both stories. There's a reason these stories continue to resonate centuries later, but I don't think it has anything to do with whether they are literally true.
> Well, I don't know for sure that I'm right about that. But: take the garden of eden story. It's a metaphor for coming of age. They realize they are naked. They are expelled from the garden (childhood) and must go out into the world where they face toil and hardship. They eat the forbidden fruit (sex). I think it's pretty clearly a parable.
This interpretation may have merit if it were a book written today, but it seems very unlikely to have been the intended one for the mid -100's BC audience as it wouldn't match the coming of age experience for children of that time. Children would be expected to know of sex very quickly. The Bible is also pretty clearly pro-sex for husbands and wives. The important takeaway of this story is, imo, that life is hard because people were bad.
The texts also reference specific rivers, placing the garden of eden somewhere in the ballpark of modern day Iraq. And much of the aesthetics like the garden itself may simply be a rehash of Mesopotamian mythology
> Take Noah's ark. Noah plans and looks towards the future and toils when everyone else is being lazy and is therefore safe when everyone else gets drowned, despite being laughed at and dismissed. It's a similar story to the grasshopper and the ant.
So old testament noah lived for almost a thousand years, and spent a couple hundred of them preparing for the flood, being told what to do by God or angels. He wasn't looking toward the future, he was exclusively told by god that the flood was coming. Other people weren't lazy, they just didn't believe him.
Bonus: When he gets off the boat, he feels bad and asks why god was such a dick, and god tells him that if he had asked for mercy in the first place, god wouldn't have destroyed the world, so it's noah's fault. And noah agrees.
> There's a reason these stories continue to resonate centuries later, but I don't think it has anything to do with whether they are literally true.
I think it has a lot to do with influential community leaders telling you have to literally believe in the texts.
Well- it's a minimal statement that I thought most everyone would agree with. You may or may not think he acted in self defense, or you may or may not think what he did was illegal, but at the bare minimum you should be able to agree that 1) people died 2) those people didn't need to die and 3) Kyle Rittenhouse bears responsibility for those deaths. Those 3 facts are sufficient to establish that "Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong" is a false statement. It's an easy target though- the assertion is that he did nothing wrong, which is a very extreme statement and therefore easy to attack.
It's kinda sad how the banner of skepticism has been co-opted and sort of turned into some sort of dogmatic scientism. We really need some pyrrho in our lives these times.
Yet the human lifespan is far too short to do your own verification for an appreciable number of important questions. At some point, practicality demands acquiescence to “someone smarter than me said so and hasn’t yet been proven blatantly incorrect” on at least some issues.
> What I realized I had no idea how to convey was how important television was to the whole experience (9/11).
What really struck me was the kind of reporting. Where I live (or, in Europe in general) – and I'm not under the impression that it had been that different in the US – there was some kind of agreement of handling severe incidents respectfully. You would show any footage a couple of times, but then everybody would know and further repetitions were rather considered as some kind of cruel pornography. But here, watching CNN and similar outlets, the planes kept crashing and crashing, and the buildings kept collapsing and collapsing, over and over, exposing the moments that meant death for thousands mercilessly on the screens. It was the beginning of a new era in mass media. And I guess, this may be hard to convey to anyone who wasn't there to experience this.
I was in High School when it happened, and yes I remember looping footage of the buildings coming down. I think it was a shock response more than a crafted plan to get views, but it did show them how to hold your attention.
One detail I remember about being in school is that we were all old enough to understand, but I was told that younger students did not understand that they were watching replays of the same incident and thought multiple buildings were collapsing every time.
This article spends its entire content deriding the notion of narratives, but it takes advantage of that very same mechanism in order to try and entice readers into following it.
I think rather than trying to find the “one true source of information”, which can be incredibly dangerous, the real “redpill” is learning to develop the meta skills of critical reading and research.
Who is the author of your piece? What are their motivations and biases? Can you find sources and citations for the research posted? At the same time, also recognize that it’s unlikely you’ll have the time/resources to fully deep dive into every piece of news or commentary that you read. That should come with it a certain level of humbleness and willingness to consider the alternative if (and when) you’re wrong.
A spooky future possibility: if we as a population are rupturing our shared perceptions of reality, will this affect our nations ability to perform on an international scale?
If so, then over time power will shift to countries that heavily dictate allowable online discourse (China)
One of my greatest dreads is that at least for this era of humanity’s evolution the National censored/moderated strategy is the correct one. It may be that free speech for a nation was the winning play before the Information Age (and may be again in the future) but isn’t now. I don’t necessarily believe this, but it’s increasingly hard to build compelling arguments against it in the face of mounting evidence.
I'm almost sure this is the case. Countries that don't lock things down are gonna get badly disrupted (not in the "good" tech-company sense) by other states that do, and take advantage of the others' openness. And not just states, but stronger-than-many-states corporations. I expect democracies to be particularly vulnerable.
I think a wide-open global Internet in anything like its current form will turn out to be one of those things that seems amazing and mostly-great when you look at it from an individual perspective but has very bad consequences at a population scale, far outweighing any benefit. Again, especially for democracies—we thought it would liberalize oppressive states, but I think we got that tragically wrong, and it may in fact be the instrument that unleashes the "chaos" and painful disorder that critics of democracy and liberalism have always predicted.
My greatest fear is the surveillance state, to be honest. The dragnet revelations mean that privacy really doesn't exist anymore, and police are always chomping at the bit to get more access to anything electronic.
Most definitely. Your enemies are counting on it. In fact, there are good reasons to believe they are mostly responsible for your current situation[1]. There's no cheaper and more effective way to do modern warfare than to psychologically manipulate your enemy's population and watch the country implode from the inside out. You even gave them the tools to do that.
As for the power shift: more than likely, yes. Governments that have a tight grip on the information that reaches its population, and have already been manipulating it for their own benefit, have a higher chance of surviving than those that don't.
We're already seeing signs of this, and it will only get crazier in the following decades. We're living in dark times.
They have 99.9% influence on international performance, whether they know it or not is a different matter.
It's the same with 99.9% of players that play MMORPG's or buy a game, or anything for that matter. The participation _is_ the performance in play, and it only exists because people participate. Yet this can be unpacked into whether those participating even know they are participating and yadda yadda.
A bit of a retorical question but isn't this a common source of contention between groups of people (across magnitudes of scale and means of information) throughout history?
2. Climate change demands a radical transformation of modern lifestyles.
A bit off-topic, but I'm sad that this was politicized, as that's exactly what's required to stop global climate change.
There are too many geopolitical forces standing in the way of concerted efforts to stop it. And even if we could summon a multilateral front, the process is probably too far along to be stopped via centralized brute force anyway. As we've passed the inflection point, the next 20 years may bring 1.5 to 2 times the warming we've already had since 2000, tipping into a runaway positive feedback loop.
Somehow everyone's got to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go solar, drive electric cars, buy local, etc. We're probably conservatively talking $10,000-100,000 USD per household, or about $40,000 if we use the logarithmic mean. Times 2 billion households, perhaps $80 trillion USD to a first-order approximation to go sustainable tomorrow. But that financial burden alone would disrupt lifestyles in the short term..
Now that's what's needed, but of course we probably won't do that. We'll just double down on our current lifestyles as developing nations join the industrialized world and fire up a bunch of nuclear plants and start scrubbing CO2, then add fusion sometime in the 2030s. Maybe put sunshades in orbit at L1, pollute the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight, seed algae blooms with iron to suck CO2, do all of the other things as we continue to deforest and desertify the planet as we finish out the 6th mass extinction of the holocene.
IMHO a distributed approach at the individual level is the only one that has a hope of succeeding. We could all choose to conserve and grow victory gardens as our patriotic duty like in WWI. But no matter how much proof is presented, people believe what they want to believe, for no other reason than to disagree with the environmentalists and academic community. Even here on this very site with some of the smartest people in the world, I suspect the opinion on this is split 50/50.
For all of those reasons, I think it's irresponsible for the article to call something like climate change a game. A nuisance we'll simply ignore to our detriment sure. But not a game.
I agree with your reasoning, but I don't see how individual level effort can solve the problem. Ignoring the fact that it's impossible (the average household simply can't spend $40,000 on anything, let alone the environment), individuals are only involved in maybe a quarter of emissions. Unless the giant corporations also change, every single human going carbon neutral wouldn't be nearly enough. It'd certainly be a big help, but it wouldn't solve the problem.
I've never really understood the "giant corporations" talking point.
Even if the numbers are accurate, giant corporations don't just create emissions for fun -- they do it to create a product that will be purchased by consumers, i.e. individuals.
If an individual buys a plastic toy, and the production of that toy caused a corporation to emit 10kg of carbon, in my mind that individual is responsible for that carbon, even if it was a Hasbro factory in China who emitted it.
Similarly, I don't understand the talking point "even if the US goes carbon neutral, China is an even bigger problem, US is only 15% of emissions". A big part of that is because the West outsourced their manufacturing (and thus emissions) to China! If the West buys carbon-intensive products from China, the West is responsible for that carbon. China isn't making container ships full of plastic toys for fun.
Obviously, China has a large domestic population with its own emissions issues with coal power plants, but non-trivial amounts of Chinese emissions are just off-shored Western emissions.
As little as I like it but war is probably an apt metapher: only once the stakes are as clear cut and direct (as in war) are people willing to change. But maybe not even then: There are countless of weather (read: climate) desasters that only lead to a rebuild, even in "intelligent" countries.
The biggest problem is that the younger generations seem more and more to grasp it but it's the old who are in power to change things. And we actually don't have the time to wait until the old die.
As I'm not a radical (although I appreciate climate radicals and wish them all the best), I do my little part but have resigned to the fact that there will be a lot of pain and runaway effects for generations to come that are already foreseen and could be prevented but simply won't. (but as I said: This doesn't mean to simply yolo. As every ton counts and I have a conscience - and will still in 30 years.)
> But no matter how much proof is presented, people believe what they want to believe, for no other reason than to disagree with the environmentalists and academic community.
I think you are wrong about that. Many rational people do the cost–benefit analysis of fixing global warming and arrive to the conclusion that it isn't worth it. Those people believe that the negative consequences simply aren't that bad and that they can be overcome through progressive adaptation and technological progress. Those people will maybe accept small costs like switching to reasonably priced EV car.
I hesitate to say it, but you're probably right. I'm a problem solver, I do a lot of root cause analysis. But as a whole, humanity isn't really driven by logic, it's driven by the survival instinct. So the health of the planet will always fall second to the health of one's children. Which is arguably as it should be.
TBH, I believe we entered the endgame with Bush v. Gore in 2000. All of this (whatever it is, hoopla, chaos) around climate change denial is a natural outcome of people's fear. We know deep down that we can't stop the devastation, so we play shell games to distract and deny. I see that as owning the libs, but that's my impression, through my filter.
So, if we're in the endgame, we should probably be thinking about outside-the-box solutions. If this is the Kobayashi Maru, then there simply isn't a logical way out of this, given our current understanding. Maybe deniers are correct to grok that and internalize the fact that no amount of personal sacrifice can save the climate now.
The kicker though is that we could have stopped it if we started half a century ago. But we chose Reagan over Carter for reasons similar to those outlined above. I feel tremendous resentment around all of that, but that doesn't help us now. Blaming deniers today doesn't solve the problem, so again, it's probably a waste of time.
So, what do we do? What will the solution be, if there is one? Well, based on everything I just said, the closest thing we have to a solution outside the box of human understanding is AI.
It's self-evident now that AI can solve really hard optimization problems like the ones needed for over-unity fusion. That's why I am certain that we'll have fusion power plants before the singularity arrives around 2040 (see Kurzweil for where that prediction comes from).
Also, compared to something like stable diffusion, self-replicating robots are a much more tractable problem. We could have them today for a trifling of money, perhaps $10-100 million for a small team. I think probably that self-replicating drones made of basic materials like wood and salt will re-seed forests.
What I'm saying is that stopping climate change is just under the order of magnitude effort required to terraform a planet. Maybe 1% of that. Granola solutions aren't enough. We need something on the scale of at least industrial agriculture. And as we're all basically just surviving due to wealth inequality, solutions need to be self-funding and self-scaling. AI FTW.
The reason I hesitate to say all of this is that it gives us a false sense of security. "The AI will solve it" will be our mantra for at least the first half of this century. Until the downsides become impossible to ignore. We might go too far and create a prison planet like in Highlander II and The Matrix movies. Then we're grappling with threats even larger than climate change.
In the face of anxiety around those looming threats, I've chosen to turn towards faith-based approaches like meditation and manifestation in my own life. I try to crystalize and evangelize my thoughts in the hopes that all of us working together can figure this stuff out. That can feel defeatist sometimes, so I'm also trying to solve prerequisite problems like how to fund UBI.
For example, looks at SpaceX. Why would they go to all the trouble of building retro rockets running on methane? Because that's what you use to land on Mars and run on the fuel available there. They're breaking down seemingly intractable problems into a series of small steps that can be overcome. That's what we need to do for climate change.
After writing this out, I still believe that this begins with all of us picking ourselves up by our bootstraps on a personal level. But I'm open to the idea that a change in lifestyle isn't enough. We should look beyond that, not just at somehow coming up with the $40,000 to go sustainable, but how to accomplish that without money, through a fundamental change in economies and culture, maybe with something like UBI. A sustainable economy could actually be more attractive than the ones we have now, if it meant a reduction in unfulfilling labor and more passive income for everyone. Then there would be an incentive for change, and it would happen automagically.
When we look at the players currently benefiting and profiting from the status quo, it's easy to see why they prevent such unity and sew division through divisive politics. If there's a root cause in all of this, that's the one I see. It's all connected.
The other comments are great too, but I'll have to pass on responding in the interest of time.
I have become pessimistic in the "Planet of the Humans" sense. Part of this is because we are able to take every piece of the problem and minimize it individually. This is what the movie showed. If you question the mining of lithium, you're pointed to the planting of trees. If you question the effectiveness of reforestation projects, you're shown the solar panels. If you ask about storage, you're shown the battery factories. And now we're back to the lithium. Did you see that we're planting trees?
You put up solar panels. You destroy the ecosystem underneath. You dam a river for hydroelectric. You destroy the upstream forest that depended on the undammed river. You switch to electric cars, you still have to produce batteries and cars. You get everyone eating more calories, you get more people demanding more from more desirable sources. As the planet heats up, we install more air conditioning that creates waste heat to move it out of the living space, and eventually leaks high-GWP refrigerant. But don't worry, those air conditioners will be replaced by other ones that use lower-GWP refrigerant...after they have leaked it.
Everything we are doing burns carbon. It's not just too much fossil fuel. It's too much activity.
And then, the shell game. We need to show we're not using carbon. So, we burn forests instead because forests are carbon-neutral if they grow back. But we are mortgaging today's energy carbon over 30 years of forest carbon-capture, which I imagine will just be burned again, along with all of the fossil fuels available in the ground, because alternatives make the fossil fuels cheaper.
Meanwhile, the environmentalists, as represented by the Sierra Club and various green-tech interests, are attacking anyone who says that we have too many people, who travel too much, and eat too much, who live too comfortably, by destroying ecosystems. And they're quiet when confronted by the people you mention, who want to keep the merry-go-round running at any cost, lest the hard times come in their lifetime.
I also think the academic community and environmentalists you refer to are rarely willing to grapple with the actual implications of the data. We really need population decline. We will need new ways of reallocating resources than endless growth. We need to figure out how to make less waste of carbon sources, especially by reducing travel and waste heat generation. And in doing so we need to strictly limit the production of fossil carbon.
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Although you didn't mention the film, it causes strong reactions in people. I have dutifully read the criticism of the film and looked into both sides' claims and my working conclusion is:
1. Jeff Gibbs had some factual inaccuracies, overstatements, and out-of-date imagery.
2. There was no reason to be singling out one person like Bill McKibben and it made the film seem like an attack on him rather than an indictment of the whole green-tech enterprise.
3. His critics are hoping you focus on the above points so that you go back to believing in the bankrupt electric-car, electric-plane, one-billion-Americans, 12-billion-humans, vegan Zymo-veal Soylent vision of individual responsibility and careful technical management that will "maintain our way of life". The fear of the message of the film is very telling.
Really weak article. Your typical bothsidesism and unity nonsense. He's talking about how the country was united to face the enemy after 9/11. Talk about fish memory. What enemy is he talking about? Did he forget about the disastrous Iraq war and the division it made? The patriot act!? NSA surveillance, the 2008 economic crisis, etc.
Most of the problems today can be traced to the Bush administration, and the aftermath of 9/11.
Reality has always been a game, it's just that we've gone from a few players to a multitude of players. The few players version has been a meta-stable state since the development of orthodoxy.
The questions that are broadly acceptable to the corporate media - i.e. that are the subjects of written or spoken debate - are generally not the important or interesting questions. They're mostly click-bait fluff intended to up the 'engagement' factor.
The only one in that list that's of much interest is about the origins of the Covid pandemic, and even there the real question is whether or not to implement a global ban on gain-of-function research with infectious viruses and microbes. As far as the details on the origins of Covid and links to the Ecohealth-Alliance-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology, well, read a book (Viral by Chan & Ridley, 2021).
Here's an alternative list of questions that I'd argue really matter, but which are typically avoided by corporate media:
1. Is the US economy overly controlled by finance, and does this have serious negative repercussions for the long-term health of the economy? Is finance really capable of long-term planning and basic infrastructure development?
2. Is the US military budget out of control? The (inflation-adjusted) size of that budget over the past few decades has certainly increased. Are those wasted resources? (A related question has to do with our military entanglements around the planet, such as with Saudi Arabia, Israel, NATO, etc.)
3. Do all of the free trade deals that the USA has pushed for over the past 40 years really help the US economy prosper, or are they the main reason for the huge wealth gap across American society and the destruction of the American manufacturing sector (and the rise of angry populist politics) ?
Now, those are interesting questions and I imagine views vary widely on those issues - but you won't see them addressed in our pathetic media system.
#3 was warned about long ago. Look at the debates with Ross Perot in them. He predicted precisely what has happened. He essentially said if we have free trade with the rest of the world and they make $2 an hour and we make $10 an hour then jobs will not stop leaving until everybody makes $6 an hour. And that is precisely what is and has happened.
The question to me is how the political class in the US has become completely captured by globalist robber barons for decades.
I think modern society is in the bad attractor field of the left-hemisphere mode of thought (as opposed to the right-hemisphere attractor field.) You see a fragmented reality unaffected by evidence, fragments out of context becoming menacing and leading to paranoia, people operating in self-contained virtual worlds based on axioms simplified to the point of falsity, positive feedback loops where exposure makes you want more, rather than negative feedback loops where you get satiated.
Thoughtful article, but not a new phenomenon. Consider the Hawking-Preskill wager regarding black hole information. The MIT Senior prank, Grievance-studies affair, or Sokal are another place where smart people do fun things. It would seem though that the endgame is wildly different though for this type of fun, where the incident social contract implies limited harm. This sort of bandwagoning which society has been pigeonholed into (betting is illegal, pranks are a cybersecurity risk) has wildly different material outcomes.
Many places a proposition can be called into question, humans do so through whatever play they're allowed.
People enjoy joining conspiracy communities because it makes life feel meaningful. I watched one of my neighbors warp into a 9/11 truther and in the last few years I run into a lot of people online who wake up in the morning and have to inform everybody about the latest discoveries they've made about how everything the government has done about COVID-19 is wrong, not just because people were having to make decisions in a hurry with limited information, but because the people involved are evil.
My first take on that article was that my answer to 5 of the 7 of the questions at the top are ambigious. For #1 for instance I think there is no real proof of the lab leak hypothesis but that it is also not implausible.
> To play an alternate reality game is to be drawn into a collaborative project of explaining the world. It is to lose, even fleetingly, one’s commitment to what is most true in the service of what is most compelling, what most advances a narrative one deeply believes.
(Or at least wants to believe.)
I do that, sometimes, quite quite consciously and even intentionally. In SF circles, it's called "suspension of disbelief".
I think the article underestimates the role of social media in all of this.
Let's state some known _facts_:
- Troll farms are operated on a massive scale in Russia, China and most G20 nations, operated by their respective governments. Their direct goal is to spread disinformation and propaganda on social media.
- Advertising that powers most social media to brainwash masses into buying products, has been weaponized to also spread disinformation and propaganda, brainwashing masses into believing conspiracy theories and being an active participant in rage culture.
Just these two facts alone are enough to destabilize communities, polarize political discourse and corrupt democratic processes.
The current sociopolitical climate in most countries with access to social media is a product of information warfare. It's the cheapest and most hands-off alternative to traditional and even cyber warfare. It's played over long timescales and doesn't produce immediate results, but it's extremely effective, and confuses the enemy into not understanding the state they're in, or how they got there. Precisely what this article is trying to determine.
Notice how your facts are not accompanied by an open source categorization algorithm (which would reveal how easy it is for them to be true, as stated/framed). Also notice that this level of epistemic transparency is not only not needed for people to believe that what you say is true (and the beliefs that subsequently emerge from that), but will typically be actively opposed by both unintelligent and genuinely intelligent people.
I don't understand what you're asking for. What I stated as facts can be independently verified by anyone with minor research. Troll farms are a reality. Cambridge Analytica and similar companies are a reality. QAnon started on an online forum, where most conspiracy theories live and grow. Information warfare exists on an unprecedented scale thanks to the internet, whether you're aware of it or not.
> I don't understand what you're asking for. What I stated as facts can be independently verified by anyone with minor research.
"Troll farms are operated on a massive scale in Russia, China and most G20 nations, operated by their respective governments. Their direct goal is to spread disinformation and propaganda on social media" is a mostly binary (True/False) assertion, thus it is vague.
The magnitude of these operations, and what they actually did (as opposed to what is claimed/implied/believed they did, typically without conclusive evidence, but lots of innuendo and rhetoric) is not actually known.
Basically: imprecise framing of reality is misinformative.
> QAnon started on an online forum, where most conspiracy theories live and grow.
This is a subjective ontological claim, and it is not possible for you to prove that it is true (which is not required for belief, but is required for the JTB definition of Knowledge - not that anyone is able to care, anyways). It may also be possible that it is not possible for you to realize this.
> Cambridge Analytica and similar companies are a reality.
Reality may appear to be binary (True/False - and portions of it are), but it is actually fundamentally ternary (True/False/Other).
> Information warfare exists on an unprecedented scale thanks to the internet, whether you're aware of it or not.
I wonder which of us possesses more knowledge on that topic. Does your intuition suggest to you that it is you? Do you possess any tools and techniques in your epistemic toolkit for dealing with this very tricky aspect of consciousness?
You seem to have a superiority complex with a desire to win an argument rather than engage in an honest discussion, but I'll indulge you for a moment.
> The magnitude of these operations, and what they actually did (as opposed to what is claimed/implied/believed they did, typically without conclusive evidence, but lots of innuendo and rhetoric) is not actually known.
First of all, a basic principle of information warfare, and warfare of any kind for that matter, is to keep your enemy and the public at large in the dark as to how it's actually performed, and the extent of its operations. So the general public will only hear about what gets to leak out, and run through the filter of their own country's media, with its own biases and agendas.
I'm speaking from the perspective of a layperson, and only know what the general public has access to. But I'm educated enough to be able to put 2 and 2 together, see the clear effects of psyops, and with the power of deduction conclude that this isn't just a single warehouse in an isolated town, but that these are operations on a global scale that are rarely reported in mainstream media.
You, on the other hand, are implying to have some insider knowledge that contradicts mine. So how about you follow your own statement, and be precise in your framing of reality?
> This is a subjective ontological claim, and it is not possible for you to prove that it is true
Which part? QAnon started on 4chan[1].
The part about conspiracy theories thriving on forums and social media comes from my own experience on the internet. So, yes, it's subjective. Do you have a different opinion about this that you would like to share?
> It may also be possible that it is not possible for you to realize this.
It very well may be. I'm not very smart.
> Reality may appear to be binary (True/False - and portions of it are), but it is actually fundamentally ternary (True/False/Other).
What? Are you claiming that Cambridge Analytica didn't exist? Or that it existed in some other dimension? It's difficult to follow your big brain arguments.
> I wonder which of us possesses more knowledge on that topic.
I would like to say that I wonder that as well, but so far you haven't said anything that made me think that you do. So I think I have more knowledge.
> Does your intuition suggest to you that it is you?
Yes. Please prove me wrong.
> Do you possess any tools and techniques in your epistemic toolkit for dealing with this very tricky aspect of consciousness?
I don't think I do. I never thought I would be contemplating conciousness in a thread about disinformation, but here we are. Can you teach some some techniques to improve my perception of reality?
> You seem to have a superiority complex with a desire to win an argument...
Am I the only one who suffers from this phenomenon in this conversation? It takes two to argue, and a claim that you are acting purely in good faith and me in bad is a little rich. If I cannot disagree with you, then how dare you disagree with me.
> ...rather than engage in an honest discussion, but I'll indulge you for a moment.
Or, we could simply disagree without engaging in speculative, self-serving framing of what is going on.
>> The magnitude of these operations, and what they actually did (as opposed to what is claimed/implied/believed they did, typically without conclusive evidence, but lots of innuendo and rhetoric) is not actually known.
> First of all, a basic principle of information warfare, and warfare of any kind for that matter, is to keep your enemy and the public at large in the dark as to how it's actually performed, and the extent of its operations. So the general public will only hear about what gets to leak out, and run through the filter of their own country's media, with its own biases and agendas.
Disagree - in addition to hearing about what gets to leak out, they also hear false &/or misinformative narratives....and as a consequence, some of them proceed to spread these narratives on social media, such as HN.
> I'm speaking from the perspective of a layperson, and only know what the general public has access to. But I'm educated enough to be able to put 2 and 2 together, see the clear effects of psyops...
I notice you say "see the clear effects" with no qualifiers - do you mean that you can see some of the effects, or do you mean all of the effects?
For example: is the cultural convention to discuss and think about matters in imprecise and ambiguous language purely organic?
> ...and with the power of deduction conclude that this isn't just a single warehouse in an isolated town, but that these are operations on a global scale that are rarely reported in mainstream media.
Depending on which definition of "on a global scale" one is meaning, this could involve anywhere from (say) 10 to 100,000 personnel.
> You, on the other hand, are implying to have some insider knowledge that contradicts mine. So how about you follow your own statement, and be precise in your framing of reality?
Is it that I am implying it and "framing reality", or might it be that you are using the powers of interpretation & perception to form a belief that I am doing these things?
I think I have a half-decent way to investigate: quote the precise text I have written that you believe does what you claim, and we can discuss it.
> Which part? QAnon started on 4chan[1]. The part about conspiracy theories thriving on forums and social media comes from my own experience on the internet. So, yes, it's subjective. Do you have a different opinion about this that you would like to share?
Actually, I think I have made an error - upon reviewing the conversation: "QAnon started on an online forum, where most conspiracy theories live and grow", I believe myself to have misinterpreted you - at the time I wrote the comment, I believed you had claimed that most conspiracies lived and grew within the QAnon subset of the conspiracy world. Upon review, your text does not seem to actually make that claim - thus, I am mistaken, and thus I owe you an apology: I am sorry for misinterpreting what you said (in this instance).
>> It may also be possible that it is not possible for you to realize this.
> It very well may be. I'm not very smart.
I don't think intelligence is a substantial requirement - in fact, I genuinely believe that it can be detrimental, and maybe even that it is usually detrimental. My thinking is this: if a person is genuinely smart, they will likely finding themself to be genuinely correct far more often than not when a disagreement arises with another person. As a consequence, I believe it is possible if not likely that one might form a expectation/heuristic that when a disagreement arises, the error is [likely to be] on the other end of the wire. And this is not merely a theory, but one that emerged based on observing human discussions carefully for many years - I believe that it is well supported by evidence, although I've never bothered to look into whether there are any supporting peer-reviewed studies.
>> Reality may appear to be binary (True/False - and portions of it are), but it is actually fundamentally ternary (True/False/Other).
> What? Are you claiming that Cambridge Analytica didn't exist? Or that it existed in some other dimension? It's difficult to follow your big brain arguments.
Most simply, it is the difference between binary logic (True/False) and ternary logic (True/False/Other).
More colourfully, I like this quote from Curtis Yarvin:
The four-stroke regime is a two-story state. When people hear one story, they tend to ask: is this true? When they hear two stories, they tend to ask: which one of these is true? Isn’t this a neat trick? Maybe our whole world is built on it. Any point on which both poles concur is shared story: “uncontroversial, bipartisan consensus.”
Shared story has root privilege. It has no natural enemies and is automatically true. Injecting ideas into it is nontrivial and hence lucrative; this profession is called “PR.”
There is no reason to assume that either pole of the spectrum of conflict, or the middle, or the shared story, is any closer to reality than the single pole of the one-story state.
Dividing the narrative has not answered the old question: is any of this true? Rather, it has… dodged it. Stagecraft!
This is even better than supposing that, since we fought Hitler and Hitler was bad, we must be good. These very basic fallacies, or psychological exploits, are deeply embedded in our political operating systems. Like bugs in code, they are invisible until you look straight at them. Then they are obvious.
---------------------------
> I would like to say that I wonder that as well, but so far you haven't said anything that made me think that you do. So I think I have more knowledge.
Did you consider the significance of "me think" in the operation? And, do you tend to consider what you believe to be true, to be necessarily true? The "T" in JTB (Justified True Belief) doesn't come for free, despite how it may seem.
>> Does your intuition suggest to you that it is you?
> Yes. Please prove me wrong.
I do not expect that a genuine proof of your incorrectness would be any match for the power of your intuition, so even if I did try and succeed at doing it, it is far from guaranteed that you would adopt it as a belief.
As I see it, there is more than enough content here already for a reasonable person to determine whether it is possible that their beliefs may be less than perfect, potentially substantially less.
> I don't think I do. I never thought I would be contemplating conciousness in a thread about disinformation, but here we are.
Do you see no dependency of disinformation on consciousness?
> Can you teach some some techniques to improve my perception of reality?
My favorite technique: for every belief you hold (or at least, assert): as seriously as possible, ask yourself the question: "Is this belief necessarily [and comprehensively] true? Is it impossible* that it could be not true, taking into consideration that I am performing this calculation using consciousness, which science has well demonstrated to be unreliable for a variety of reasons?"
Generally speaking, most people I've floated this idea to find it to be ~utterly bizarre...a phenomenon which I find to be utterly bizarre and wouldn't believe had I not witnessed it myself so many times.
I recommend a Bayesian approach. How likely is it that something is true? After a new event, how does that update your priors?
Truth? The world around you is true. Your attempt to describe the world around you is always going to miss the mark if ever so slightly. You can always put it to a test. Point at a slab, imply that I should move it to another location, if I then move the slab, well our little language game at least conforms enough to reality to be useful.
We can talk Epistemology. I'm willing to both assert something is True and be humble I may be wrong about it at the same time.
I think you ask the wrong question. I'd rather ask, is this something that is both meaningful to assert as True and is this something I have some type of primary knowledge (careful statistics, first hand knowledge that is collaborated) of? I may still give something a low certainty (depending on the quality of predicate knowledge) and still assert something as True if that decision is meaningful to my life and others around me.
Robert Anton Wilson, renowned pot philosopher, proposed a revision to the english language: to remove the word "is". The problem with "is true" can be that you get affixed to the assertion, i.e. that it becomes something you're unwilling to question in future if new facts come to light. If you can think more in terms of "probably true", "plausible", etc then you can maintain more plasticity in your worldview.
No, Korzybski (or rather Korzybski's disciple Bourland) invented E-prime, not fnord RAW. E-prime prohibits "is true" only as fnord collateral damage; no real difference exists between "RAW invented E-prime" and "It is true that RAW invented E-prime".
Bourland hoped E-prime would improve people's thinking by removing "Aristotelian" notions of identity of entities and of entities having attributes, not by removing the passive voice or the distinction between truth and falsehood.
That said, your wikipedia link says: "Kellogg and Bourland describe misuse of the verb to be as creating a "deity mode of speech", allowing "even the most ignorant to transform their opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things"."
While (objectively speaking) there are objectively true things, would you not disagree that "is true" is overused and leads to sloppy thinking?
If you take the old wisdom of the East and scientific knowledge from the West and go deep enough, you may conclude that this is related to human features that are not new.
We start believing things, and then make up stories around these beliefs. Facts do not usually make us re-evaluate the beliefs, but to just refine our stories.
The meta-narrative of the article is just a story. You cannot get around the human feature by reading or inventing new beliefs or stories.
If you want to free yourself from this conundrum, you need to learn to hack the beliefs and stop believing the stories you tell yourself.
Asking questions that are claims and demanding yes/no answers is irrational. The valid form is how courts work, you make a claim, and then either agree with the claim or disagree with claim. So valid answers are yes, and not convinced of yes, or no and not convinced of no. But that is two separate claims,
So valid questions are
Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese laboratory? Convinced or not Convinced.
Covid-19 did not escape from a Chinese laboratory? Convinced or not Convinced.
What a great article. Perfectly walks through the current social crisis of ennui and stupidity. The one thing that it didn't seem to mention is a physiological-chemical basis for all the enjoyment. Ever wonder why every video of some guy cooking an egg or screwing in a light bulb screams at you about how "satisfying" it is? This lack of some satisfaction, no doubt caused by some mechanisms of addiction, is clearly at play in this video game reality show.
Characterizing the early 00s right after 9/11 as a time of unity is not right. It was also a time of massive hatred and bigotry against Muslims and liberals.
>It’s not that strange actually. In fact, the difference between apophenia and science is just the scientific process and the reliance on proof. People make the connection before they know for a fact if it’s real or not. Maybe it is apophenia, maybe not. It’s a hypothesis. THEN YOU TEST IT. The facts determine the outcome and then, whether it feels good or not, you accept them. Even scientists may not want to let go of a good theory that just isn’t panning out. The feeling of correctness is over-powering. This is why people need to have peer-reviews. Colleagues need to be able to replicate results. Solutions need to be tested and the facts harnessed.
>In Q, the proof is more apophenia! Another arrow in the dirt in an endless cycle back to the central propaganda. It has to because there is no truth. The answer is whatever feels the best, makes the most sense, and helps the story. Any truth is just fuel for the propaganda and reinforces the conclusions of the apophenia and central narrative.
>It feels like it’s really happening. It especially seems so when cheered on by a curated fake “community” clapping you on the back and telling you you are a hero for every radical leap into the void you make.
Once you start to parse reality according to what feels right, embracing cognitive biases in the process, people will of course exploit that. Because its very profitable. There is a reason the advertisement industry is as big as it is
Feels like peak capitalism where we have most needs met at the minimum required level and so we seek out more novelty and fun in our lives. Used to just be TV, but the amped up level of interest and adrenalin when it's happening in reality is too appealing.
I think it comes down to identity. There’s no conflict to believe Russiagate was fake and that Trump lost the election. But people treat politics like team sports and chose their “teams” position on matters.
What we haven’t figured out how to make sense of yet is the fun that many Americans act like they’re having with the national fracture.
Why is the author confused about this? The people who are having fun are doing so because they see a correlation between the degree of fracture and their own wellbeing (political, economic, strategic). They don't feel invested in the status quo (perhaps quite legitimately) and see more opportunity in either a fragmented and chaotic polity or a new status quo in which they occupy a higher position.
Sure, you could say 'but this makes no sense, everyone will be worse off', but this is self-evidently not the case. Revolutions, civil wars, etc. have winners and losers. Most end up as losers, but some people make out like bandits. And people who are losing (or who just feel like they're not winning enough) under the current or foreseeable future systems feel incentivized to bet on something different.
The point of [role playing games] was not to beat your opponent but to share in the thrill of making up worlds and pretending to act in them.
No. The point of role-playing games is to experience freedom of action by making up worlds with fewer constraints - but with the validation that comes from sharing the process as opposed to daydreaming. For kids and teenagers the constraints might be structural ones like having to go to school and follow arbitrary-seeming conventions. For adult enthusiasts the constraints might be economic reality - without access to unusual resources or talent, the options and payoff horizons of everyday life may seem very unsatisfying.
You can see a sort of meta-argument about this in the rise of boring simulation videogames, which let you experience a dull job or social obligation in all its futility and tedium, with the payoff for the player being that when you get sufficiently bored, you are allowed to stop playing and nothing bad will happen - whereas rejecting things that seem dysfunctional or futile in normal life might be economically disastrous.
The main change wrought by the internet has been the widespread realization that political representatives and social elites are not the highly refined output of a meritocratic selection process, but often mediocrities that lucked into assortativity and network effects. Those who perceive social and economic institutions to be gamed in various ways are incentivized to rewrite the rules of the game in their favor, and are enthusiastic in proportion to their skill and expectations of success.
Think of the old not-really-a-joke about the two campers whose sleep is disturbed by a bear. One stirs up the fire with the plan of scaring the bear away, the other starts putting on shoes. 'Why are you putting on shoes? you can't outrun a bear' says the first camper, to which the second replies 'I don't have to - I only need to outrun you.' I describe it as not-really-a-joke because this sort of story can be a subtextual way of communicating that the teller prefers to minimize their own risk rather than pool it with someone else, and disavows any prior assumptions about teamwork or loyalty. Similar examples include the frog and scorpion (frog gives scorpion a lift across a river; scorpion stings him because 'it's in my nature' although this makes them bother worse off) and the woman who picked up the snake (which then bites her and says 'what did you expect, I'm a snake' and slithers off in search of another victim).
Often, people are communicating their preferred or idealized outcomes quite clearly, but their audience are confused or unhappy about it and respond with appeals to decency, reality, science, orthodoxy and so on. Such appeals are often a coping mechanism to avoid the unpleasant implication that the communicator is going to bail on, sabotage, or attack them. Appeals to moral or existential authority are only forceful to the degree of mutual connectivity, and miss the fact that in these story examples the parties are isolated and there's nobody around to intervene.
To sum up, when people set out to reshape reality it's often because they see advantage in doing so, and disagreements about rationality often mask a conflict of values.
> Perhaps even revolution was the result. Russian revolutionary activity, in particular, was inextricably tied up with novels. Lenin wrote about Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? that “before I came to know the works of Marx … only Chernyshevsky wielded a dominating influence over me, and it all began with What Is to Be Done?,” and that “under its influence hundreds of people became revolutionaries.” He later borrowed the novel’s title for his own 1902 revolutionary tract.
In our day, the departure from consensus reality began in innocent fashion, and with a different genre of entertainment: with wizards and dice rolls in 1970s basements.
As cultlike and dogmatic as the Communist party became, I don't think this is a very apt comparison.
Pleasant revolutionaries we're starving and demanded land reform. Worker revolutionaries we're being burnt up like fuel and demanded relief. Whatever crank beliefs they had were not their primary motivator the way cultural political derangement seems to be the primary motivator of QAnon and hardcore MAGA.
5. It originated from lies, but found truths in the process.
6. Probably not, causal links are hard to establish
7. True
The "problem" with the questions they asked, is that short pithy statements like these lack all form of nuance and so cannot fully encapsulate what is actually reality. They only contain a distilled perception of that reality through a particular set of biases. For the most part, nothing in life is that simple, and therefore simple statements are often not actually factual, because they miss critical nuance and detail to make them so.
Ironically, if you read my answers above, you likely think I'm right-wing adjacent based on them, but in fact I am politically left-of-center, I either didn't have enough information to answer conclusively, or I have investigated these topics so thoroughly that I am aware that it's not very clear cut. For instance, several of these relate to recent issues from the former administration in the US... I've read the Mueller Report, somehow despite being rather thorough, very different pithy perspectives are arrived at from the contents by various partisans.
I think the article has a point, but I think the bigger issue is that most people only have the attention span and mental acuity necessary to deal in soundbites, whether that's from the Internet, cable news, or newspaper headlines doesn't really matter. It's not the medium that's the issue, it's that the average person expends no mental energy whatsoever on actually understanding the topics they hold forth opinions on. I've always tried to be someone with strong opinions, loosely held, and open to evidence and reason. Unfortunately the average person is somebody with weak opinions, strongly held, and closed to evidence and reason. The Internet didn't cause this, this is just how human beings generally are, the world over, and throughout history.
“It’s not for the lack of traffic signs and signals that people keep crashing into each other at intersections rather that the average person does not take it upon themselves to slow down.”
I think a significant insight missing from it is that corporations, states, wars, and the like are also alternate reality games — as was the cultural wasteland of mass-media-manufactured consent whose loss it mourns. Not just the genesis of revolutions, but also their aftermath.
It does glance at this idea but doesn't seriously engage with it:
> the bygone era of mass media was not a golden age of truth, … But what matters here is that… [i]n an age of alternate realities, narratives do not converge.
Is that really what matters? Is it even a new phenomenon, or a process that was ever interrupted? I don't think that, in the bygone era of mass media, the narrative peddled on NBC converged with that of Iran's Guardian Council or Pravda; nor did Joe McCarthy's narrative ever converge with that of the Port Huron Statement. And there are times, like the murder of Kitty Genovese, where the narrative did converge, but it converged on utter falsehood.
If this doesn't convince you, reread the article carefully, thinking about how well or poorly each thing it says about modern alternate reality games applies to the historical persecution of Communists in the US, anti-Communists in the USSR and PRC, or heretics in the Spanish Inquisition. You will find it an uncomfortably tight fit.
To me it seems more important to be able to coexist with people with different beliefs, people who aren't playing the same alternate reality game you are. Lacking that ability, dissent yields mass bloodshed, so polities ruthlessly suppress dissent in order to survive, condemning themselves to self-defeating delusion. We have centuries of practice developing institutions (that is to say, alternate reality games) that can survive dissent: liberalism, capitalism, academia, pacifism, Gandhian nonviolent resistance, parliamentary procedure, and now free software and Wikipedia. Other cultures have other institutions I'm unfamiliar with.
All of them are under immense stress from the internet revolution, and it's anybody's guess how that will shake out.
Maybe because people are increasingly feeling as if they are spectators to their life going by. Our lives are increasingly feeling like they are run by media bosses and central bankers.
What’s the difference between a VR simulation and a Divine Creation, though? - Both are synthesised realities contingent on the patronage of some kind of administrative creator.
I always liked this thought experiment, as outlined by Alan Watts:
> Let's suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power to dream in one night 75 years' worth of time.
> Or any length of time you wanted to have.
> And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes.
> You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive.
> And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say
> 'Well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise.
> Let's have a dream which isn't under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be.'
> And you would dig that, and come out of it and say 'That was a close shave, now wasn't it?'
> Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you
would dream, and finally, you would dream where you are now.
> You would dream of the life that you are actually living in today.
> That would be within the infinite multiplicity of the choices you would have.
> Of playing that you weren't God. Because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he's not.
> The first thing that he says to himself is 'Man, get lost,' because he gives himself away.
> The nature of love is self-abandonment, not clinging to oneself.
> Throwing yourself out, for instance as in basketball; you're always getting rid of the ball.
> You say to the other fellow 'Have a ball.' See? And that keeps things moving. That's the nature of life.
Countless people have seen past the veil and lived to tell about it. Until now, the mainstream of the developed world has provided a strong inoculation against any such views spreading - namely, that it can be safely and instantaneous disregarded as mental illness. No further inquiry necessary.
That's the part that's about to begin changing. Slowly at first, as people like Kanye West come to realize they've been gas-lit. I expect this change to pick up steam though I can't guess the rate right now. HN will be the last dark dominion of Left-Hemisphere-Dominance to be dragged, demanding citations and invoking logical fallacies all the way, into the present.
> HN will be the last dark dominion of Left-Hemisphere-Dominance to be dragged, demanding citations and invoking logical fallacies all the way, into the present.
Thanks for giving me a good chuckle this morning! God, this place is great.
> Until now, the mainstream of the developed world has provided a strong inoculation against any such views spreading - namely, that it can be safely and instantaneous disregarded as mental illness. No further inquiry necessary.
Too true.
> That's the part that's about to begin changing.
Agree...it is becoming more and more common on the internet (in varying forms), and appearing in places where it would have been formerly rejected outright.
> Slowly at first, as people like Kanye West come to realize they've been gas-lit. I expect this change to pick up steam though I can't guess the rate right now.
The rate is not necessarily a costant - for example, if a catalyst was to appear on the scene, the rate of change could take on a much more steep upward trajectory (for good or for ill).
> HN will be the last dark dominion of Left-Hemisphere-Dominance to be dragged, demanding citations and invoking logical fallacies all the way, into the present.
My intuition strongly suggests your intuition is right...but then this sort of thing can be taken into consideration.
Pretty salient article, even if it felt like it hyperfixated on the low-hanging QAnon fruit, and not more controversial examples of perverted/wishfully-thought reality. Well-worth a second read!
One could imagine a clueless individual playing an ARG not realizing it's fictitious. Especially the less-interactive not-really-ARG ones where it's just a series of video uploads. Like, maybe, AlanTutorial.
We as a society failed to see the bad thing about the internet and the services we are creating. May be it’s capitalism or may be it’s our naive trust that humans will figure it out, but the internet exaggerated our ability to lie and cover up that lie by lying again and again. People do that in real life too but the ease, quickness and scale at which one can lie and provide corroborative lies is something we completely missed. The 2016 election cycle made is when people fully realized this and q is the manifestation of this. Prior to the internet grifters would just operate in a geographically limited area but now it’s basically free to reach the whole world. They are taking advantage of every news event. Some worried that AI would the downfall of our civilization but the internet started it and AI with deepfake could just complete it. May be I am being too pessimistic ut I don’t think we can fix it at this point.
"The point here is not to draw a moral equivalence, or to say that all these actors have lost their grip to the same degree, but rather to suggest a troubling family resemblance. The underlying structure of the reality-gamesmanship we find in, say, Infowars has its counterpart in, say, Trump-era CNN: incentives and rewards, heroes and villains, plotlines, reveals, satisfying narrative arcs."
Structurally CNN could never claim to have video of "literal vampire pot-belly goblins" coming to steal their children like Jones has. When it comes to this topic, the two just are not counterparts in any sense worth considering morally or otherwise.
The underlying stucture the author describes simply notes that both CNN and Infowars use narrative. True, but this observation could be applied to virtually any public facing commercial enterprise (not just news) both present and past.
In the context of this piece (even after the author's self-aware qualification) its a glaring mistake to describe Infowars and CNN as each others "counterpart" regarding making Reality into a game. Infowars does so with far greater intensity and impact to the point where comparison much less equivalence feels like a disengenous attempt to "both sides" their way out of coming across as partisan. Up to now, a left-wing counterpart with remotely the reach and intensity of things like Infowars, OAN, or even Fox news has simply not immerged. To treat this topic seriously acknowledgement of the partisan imbalance is necesary and shouldn't be ignored/side-stepped.
There does not exist left-wing counterpart to Jan 6 and the subsequent acceptance of it on the right. There does not exist a left-wing counterpart to the belief that Obama was a succesfully installed manchurian candidate from Kenya (of all countries). There does not exist a left wing counterpart to Fox News' political comic section on a daily basis promoting for over a year (still ongoing) a conspiracy that Joe Biden finds nourishment drinking literal children's blood from a sippy cup. There does not exist a left-wing counterpart to contesting deeply understood physical phenomena like climate change fueled by human produced CO2. But we don't blink at these things, because it's "normal" for rightwing outlets to do this in a way it simply is not for left wing outlets.
The steele dossier finds its counterpart not in Jan 6 as the piece seems to suggest with it's a or b "pick one" offering, but the far lesser scandal of Hunter Biden's laptop. Both are tainted wells of genuine and partisan injected scandal. And its worth acknowledging, the left abuses objectivity occasionally like with their floating of the Steele Dossier. Still, the left has never so much whispered something so politcally scandolous as abandonment of parliamentary democracy. The Republican party, after failing to do so on Jan 6, continues pursuing just that within state legislatures as its main political project at the moment. Chalking up Jan 6 and Steele Dossier as essentially the same thing at heart just dialed to different degrees really misunderstands the techniques, technologies, and structures at play.
This imbalance has to be reckoned with for a serious attempt to better understand the "gamefication of reality" occuring foremost within both mainstream and fringe Republican realms and to an almost incomprably diminished degree on the left.
However, there is only evidence to the contrary, the entire stretch from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the confirmed hotspot of the outbreak (samples from cages have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2) is entirely unaccounted for by this theory (this is about 20 minutes by car), the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 have been found in Laos and Vietnam (BANAL-236, BANAL-52) and not in China, and (according to US studies) there is genetic evidence for animal-human-animal-human transfer. As far as I am concerned, this is yet another attempt to make reality match preconceived politics. (Because reality is just another political game: who cares what may have actually happened, as long as we may own somebody?)
Edit: To me, the real problem with this kind of games is that they tend to turn into an existential challenge or even threat. "If we can't own them, this will mean their victory, we may never allow this to happen! Otherwise, we're doomed."
But then I've heard assertions to the effect of a WIV research group performing sample collections at one of the caves in South East Asian countries where the closest wild relatives were found. (That they collected samples far afield is, as far as I know, uncontroversial; people are just arguing about whether they collected them at any of the specific closest-relative sites, which seems like a moot point if there is already more than one closest relative and so there could be more somewhere we didn't independently check)
If anything, animal-human-animal-human transfer seems to serve to lessen the significance of the distance between the institute and the market and the samples from cages (since this makes a "researcher got infected in lab leak and then went to the market, infecting someone there, who passed it to the caged animals" sequence possible).
Either way, I rarely see the same type of rigour or skepticism being applied to the natural-origin hypothesis (why is closest relatives being in a random cave in Laos a stronger argument against provenance through a far-away lab that does field work than against provenance through a wildlife market that is equally far away?), which is a hallmark of motivated reasoning. Motivation, here, is clearly plentiful, from researchers who could be personally scrutinised or have their scientific work encumbered by kneejerk procedural impositions to all the hundreds of millions of people for whom one or the other outcome would become a supreme cudgel to beat their outgroup with.
Something that is overwhelmingly most likely in a general case may not be overwhelmingly most likely in a specific one given additional information. The vast majority of people do not die of violent causes, and yet we still have murder investigations. Relative probability is not preserved by conditioning: in an investigation seeking to establish if someone was murdered, the general prevalence also does not backpropagate to affect appropriate levels of skepticism towards concrete possible mechanism of death. For example, if you had a mysterious case of arsenic poisoning where you had trouble in explaining how arsenic wound up in the dead person's body except by teleportation, it would be unsound to argue that it wasn't murder because teleportation is not known to exist, but the theory that it teleported into the victim naturally should be above scrutiny since natural deaths are extremely common.
Yes, but if you had someone who died of an apparent heart attack, you could also spin all kinds of theories about how they were poisoned with an undetectable agent cooked up by a foreign intelligence agency.
Sure, but if that's the metaphor you want to invoke for this situation, you need to actually argue that the probabilities of the "lab leak" vs. "natural origin" scenarios are actually similar, _in this particular case_, to "undetectable agent" vs. "natural heart attack" - which brings us back to having to comb through the evidence on both sides. I think we are bound to walk in circles as long as we don't separate the proposition that it was in fact a lab leak from the proposition that further open-ended investigation is necessary; it is my impression that natural origin proponents mostly are strongly against both (whether they think the latter is too costly, or think it will be used to get the former accepted when it is actually false, or think the former should be treated as false even if it is true), but I really only want to push for the latter (it's not like I know anything about virus genetics myself anyway!).
I think something like a convincing natural pipeline (such as a close relative with last common ancestor predating known human infections) from a wild animal population that was shown to be traded at the wildlife market, or in contact with some population that was, would be pretty compelling. Barring that, systematic evidence against the circumstantial evidence for the lab leak would bring us closer to the general prior that infectious viruses arise in nature: show that the "furin cleavage site" or what that molecular construction which was found to resemble a gain-of-function grant proposal closely was called arose naturally in some other case, have another COVID-like virus emerge somewhere where the circumstances are not met but the purported circumstances of the natural origin story are (like Laos?), have hackers make a credible leak of all the internal data the WIV took offline in the wake of COVID and no data implicating them turn up, ...
I mean, I have no expertise in any of this, but I was under the impression that there was already evidence of a natural pipeline, though again I don't know the details, but it involved bats and/or pangolins. Also, given the name of the virus is sars-cov-2, I would think that a sars-cov-1 might already have happened and could perhaps qualify as another example of a similar virus with a natural origin.
I have to say I'm pretty skeptical of the whole lab leak theory thing - and it's hard to pin down what a lab leak means - there seems to be a spectrum of theories that range from a virus sampled from natural origins that escaped a lab in Wuhan to a fully lab created artificial virus, and plenty of theories in between.
But at the end of the day, it seems like most people just want it to be true for some reason; perhaps they want to blame China for the pandemic or they just want some explanation that's more satisfying than a random mutation of a virus at the wrong time and the wrong place brought the world to its knees and is still causing downstream affects throughout the global economy through to today and probably will for years to come.
If there was concrete evidence (of the form I described) beyond speculation, I don't know about it. Bats have a relative of the virus, but as was said further up in the conversation and if I understand correctly, it was found very far away from Wuhan in caves that are a lot more interesting for coronavirus researchers than for wildlife traders.
> sars-cov-1
That was the original SARS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS), which from what I understand didn't have the features that made COVID so suspect and whose existence probably was also one of the main drivers of funding for coronavirus gain-of-function research, so the causality there could go either way.
> I have to say I'm pretty skeptical of the whole lab leak theory thing - and it's hard to pin down what a lab leak means - there seems to be a spectrum of theories that range from a virus sampled from natural origins that escaped a lab in Wuhan to a fully lab created artificial virus, and plenty of theories in between.
I think it's more than fair to be skeptical - as a 60% believer, in a world where it was the accepted gospel, I'd be one of the skeptics! - but I don't see why "there are different theories that could be glossed as 'lab leak'" is any sort of evidence that the total probability of all the theories that could be glossed as such is lower (relative to the situation where there is exactly one theory).
> But at the end of the day, it seems like most people just want it to be true for some reason; perhaps they want to blame China for the pandemic or they just want some explanation that's more satisfying than a random mutation of a virus at the wrong time and the wrong place brought the world to its knees and is still causing downstream affects throughout the global economy through to today and probably will for years to come.
I mean, I could say the same thing of the converse - it seems like most people on the natural origin side just want it to be false for some reason; perhaps they are morally offended by the idea that someone would blame China for the pandemic or certain politicians in the US would get to strut around feeling vindicated, or want some explanation that's more reassuring than that the people who we considered to be our intellectual vanguard to have been short-sighted and irresponsible and caused a lot of damage.
I don't feel a desire to see anything that could be read as "blaming China for the pandemic"; I'm generally for science and skeptical of excessive demands for safety and think that shit happens, and wouldn't even "blame" the Soviet Union for Chernobyl. However, in this particular case, _if_ it were to turn out it was a lab leak, there are obvious comparatively cheap actions we could and should take to make a repeat less likely, and moreover in that situation we would have a strong case to increase oversight over the institutions that worked so hard to try to prevent us from coming to that conclusion (although this last thing might also amount to another grounds on which some people will want the lab leak hypothesis to be false), hopefully increasing our society's general ability to solve problems.
Perhaps I should ask you as well - what would you consider sufficient evidence to convince you that it was a lab leak?
As I said, I really don't have much insight into virology, but I also get a lot of what I'd classify as "god of the gaps"[0] type feelings when people start talking about gaps in the documented evolutionary record of the virus. I suspect there was not much interest in studying the evolution of corona viruses in raccoon dogs of the Wuhan region prior to 2020, so if there's a spotty history of all the variations that it went through, I'm not really surprised.
> but I don't see why "there are different theories that could be glossed as 'lab leak'" is any sort of evidence that the total probability of all the theories that could be glossed as such is lower (relative to the situation where there is exactly one theory)
I didn't say that to mean that I think a spectrum of lab leak theories changes the odds of whether or not it is true; what I'm saying is that I don't know that there is a coherent story of what the "lab leak theory" is supposed to mean; I've seen many different ones. And without a single coherent theory, it just looks like anomaly hunting to me, which is a feature of grand conspiracy theories.
And yes, without a singular theory of a lab leak, I don't understand the goals of those pushing them, but seeking a coherent, understandable explanation for complex and capricious natural phenomena seems like a natural human feature, and perhaps an adaptation to allow us to cognitively process the world around us; it also seems to me like the basis for religion.
> I mean, I could say the same thing of the converse - it seems like most people on the natural origin side just want it to be false for some reason;
I certainly see some of this, and some of it is I'm sure a backfire response to the people pushing the lab leak thing, or perhaps the wilder versions of the lab leak theory. But for myself, the natural origin just seems... natural. Viruses have existed since presumably the dawn of life and been with us and adapted along with us since long before we were homo sapiens, and this is most likely just another one.
As for what would I consider sufficient evidence of a lab leak? Again I don't know much about viruses, so as far as genomic/molecular analysis, a group of well respected authorities in the field who had reason to believe of an artificial tampering would be a nice start, but that will always be tough for me to interrogate and understand, and I have a hard time believing it could be truly definitive. Much better would be human evidence - notes from the lab, scientists espousing their role in the leak, etc...
If I read the article correctly, this doesn't quite rise to the level that I outlined in the post you are responding to; they haven't actually identified an ancestral form of the virus that exists in a wild population (thus relying on statistical methods to make inferences about its evolutionary history, whose reliability I think is a little suspect), and even if we assume that all conclusions they draw are in fact correct it does not rule out something like the original poster's multi-hop human-animal-human-animal provenance, starting in a lab leak.
Mind that RaTG13 isn't the closest known relative, BANAL-236 and BANAL-52 are much closer, and they are not known to have been present in China, nor is there evidence for these being studied at WIV. (Also mind that these are also just "cousins" and not directly related. We actually do not know of any direct lineage.) And where is any evidence (via social network analysis or whatever) to link the outbreak to any member of the WIV, be it socially or geographically? Or even a hint? All we have is evidence for the wet market as the center of origin of the outbreak and no link between this and the WIV, and no, these are not in the same vicinity, and (from genetic evidence) that the virus must have been around for some time.
If we happen to ignore all the counter-evidence and insist on, "but it could have happened", without providing any evidence for this, I've a hard time finding a crucial difference between this argument and "Ancient Aliens". And, to return to the subject of the thread, it seems to be all about the thrills of the "game".
What exactly do you mean by "ignoring the counter-evidence"? I don't think I am (if I did in the literal sense, I would be thinking that it was a lab leak with 100% certainty, not the 60% or so that I actually have!), and if anything, the actions of the US ruling class at the height of the COVID years were closer to something you could describe as that, as they were the ones who sought to banish discussion of the possibility of a lab leak from the public sphere and prevent further investigation after a small-scale one performed by people who were (in my eyes, quite convincingly) argued to have conflicts of interest.
As I said, I'm by no means certain that COVID originates from a lab leak, and I would actually like to get greater certainty as to whether it did. COVID was very costly to society at large (and to me personally), so we should be willing to expend a lot of resources on minimising the likelihood of something like it happening again as well, which includes determining what the best way of spending resources is as well. If it was due to a lab leak, the optimal way of spending resources looks very different from if it was due to a natural animal-human transmission; among others we may want to significantly tighten safety protocols and enforcement in infectious disease research and review if it may be optimal to suspend certain classes of research entirely (i.e. pay in foregone discoveries). If it was animal-human transmission, we may instead be interested in limiting interactions between humans and wild animals, which also has a high (cultural, organisational, enforcement) cost. If you frame this to be about the "thrills of the game", what can't be framed as that?
You can instead feel free to not form an opinion, accept your ignorance and remain open to future information. That's what most of us should do on most topics most of the time.
So no one should form an opinion on anything unproven? I dont think OP ever said they were not open to future information, and in fact expressed that they wanted more information.
Oh, I just mean in terms of not looking like an idiot or a jackass for believing in nonsense. Safer bet is to stick to the facts, or at least be aware of the limit of the facts and know when you've left them behind.
Whenever I read an article that treats 9/11 as anything other than inside job meant to goad the public into accepting an insane "War on Terror", I question the credibility of it's author.
Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that removed obstacles to global domination of petro-dolllar are a direct consequence of this event.
The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone moved to newspapers to printed national and global news. That was bad b/c it lowered the options people had for consuming news and dramatically reduced the diversity of ideas and opinions. The Internet was going to do the same to the point that we all read the same big websites and therefore had the same thoughts, opinions etc. <end of the point>
I remember reading this and thinking "that kind of makes sense". Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. It's not surprising that we've become so divided when you can "build" your own reality by choosing the information streams that you want to consume.
PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today.