Subj : Re: Computers To : MIKE POWELL From : Fissile Syntax Date : Wed Jul 17 2024 20:23:00 MP> I feel like that has to do with people gravitating to social media sites, MP> especially those that echo their own beliefs, for social interaction that MP> they don't get on news sites. A lot of this is the sense of seeking out a frame of reality which matches one's own. I read, in a disciplined way, across the political spectrum, and the one constant I notice is the belief that one position on that spectrum approximates reality as it currently is, with other positions being distortions and the people who hold those positions being deluded in some way. I am a skeptic of my own frame of reality. I know that I've changed my mind on a lot of issues over time. But as a consequence of this, I've never really trusted anyone's take on "how things really are," regarding well-written opinions as, essentially, elephant parts. The smartest people on different parts of the spectrum give me a limited, partially-insightful perspective, and I try my best to synthesize this into a flawed, sloppy, but perhaps workable approximation of reality as it truly is. People are in love with "to be" verbs. A thing "is" the way I say it is. But for me, the world merely *appears* to be a certain way, based on my perspective. This has made me jittery and neurotic. It is not pleasant. People's assuredness about their views of the world adds a weird kind of surreal screwheadeness to the whole affair. Social media, as you point out, really does concentrate people into narrative feedback loops which encourage viewing a subjective experience as some kind of apprehension of objective reality. And when you read carefully across the spectrum, one constant you notice is how horribly people misrepresent the opinions and motivations of their opposition. All of this makes me skeptical that anyone really knows what is going on. --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64) * Origin: Shipwrecks & Shibboleths [San Francisco, CA - USA] (21:1/227) .