[HN Gopher] Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uni...
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Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Author : pseudolus
Score : 32 points
Date : 2022-04-11 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| RGamma wrote:
| Fair summary of America's disheartening descent into structural
| idiocy. "Glad" I can see it with the clarity of an outsider, but
| then again... these things tend to cross the big pond sooner or
| later at least somewhat, as evidenced by right-wing flareups here
| in Europe.
|
| Hope we will be able to look back on this with the relief of
| having overcome a bad dream. Then again, there won't be long
| until _that other crisis_ hits... and that one 's not just
| happening in the head.
| bobobob420 wrote:
| This journalist really wrote an entire article about facebook.
| Why is an essay needed to descibe obvious behaviour that everyone
| sees and can intuitely understand with their eyes. "In the 20th
| century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing
| institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got
| stupider en masse."
|
| ???? People didn't get stupider in the last decade. There is
| access to more information and education then ever has been. We
| are slowing coming towards ultimate prosperity. Just look at the
| response to the Russia-Ukraine war. With technology education has
| slowly reached every human and everyone is aware of corruption
| and how war is merely a tool used by the powerful that only
| results in the rest of society harmed. Look at the reactions to
| things like abortion or taking rights away from people. There is
| so much progression yet the author lets his jaded view of
| Mr.Zuck's actions and his own obsession with social media to
| recreate this misguided world view. A view where access to
| political information that doesn't fit his point a view is a
| world where humans have become stupider.
| bobobob420 wrote:
| "The stupidity on the right is most visible in the many
| conspiracy theories spreading across right-wing media and now
| into Congress. "Pizzagate," QAnon, the belief that vaccines
| contain microchips, the conviction that Donald Trump won
| reelection--it's hard to imagine any of these ideas or belief
| systems reaching the levels that they have without Facebook and
| Twitter."
|
| I feel sad for this author. Still clinging on to right vs left.
| Refusing to understand that half of the country voted for the
| candidate he opposes. Yet he can not make the simple
| intellectual jump to understand the other side? You really
| cannot sit in the shoes of Americans who vote differently to
| you and understand why they feel this way, what their reality
| is, what their experiences are, what they have been taught?
| This intolerableness stems from the author's high horse he sits
| on. This article is merely a reflection of his own lack of
| intellegence.
| redmen wrote:
| You sound so angry here. What are your thoughts on Ray Dalio,
| polarization?
|
| My thought is that this is a force of nature the USA is up
| against.
|
| Even in nature before humans, things polarize. There is a
| balance between the strong and the weak force. Between
| cooperation and competition. It's when these balances get
| thrown off we move towards another.
| redmen wrote:
| And more information automatically means better?
|
| Look at covid and how dumb people were on that.
|
| I think there is a positive correlation between access to
| information and vaccine denial.
| rayiner wrote:
| Haidt makes an excellent observation about the mid-20th century
| unity being an aberration due to the technology of the time:
|
| > Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he
| notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single
| "mass audience," all consuming the same content, as if they were
| all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of
| their own society.
|
| Something I think we overlook is that America was more fractious
| prior to the mid-20th century, but the stakes were lower because
| our institutions were more distributed and more local. The
| federal government had a vastly smaller scope back then, but so
| did nationwide and multinational corporations. Differences in
| world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and
| executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in
| another city and state. Our current structure, with a homogenous
| federal government and nationwide corporations arose against the
| backdrop of that unity.
|
| What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism
| and localism as a solution. Aside from maybe California, our
| individual states remain vastly less fractious than the nation as
| a whole. Here in Maryland, for example, our Republican governor
| has an approval rating over 70% in both rural and urban areas.
| That's not because the state doesn't have ideological diversity--
| a third of the state voted for Trump. But the extremes are
| compressed compared to the nation as a whole--Baltimore isn't San
| Francisco but neither is Carroll County rural Alabama. Not only
| that, it's hard to get folks in Carroll County worked up about
| Baltimore they way they get worked up about San Francisco, and
| vice versa.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| > Differences in world view are less significant when the
| bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live
| nearby instead of in another city and state.
|
| How do you reconcile this with jim crow-era terrorism, for
| example? The movements were local and very loosely organized on
| even a regional level, but the bureaucrats wielded incredible
| power over individuals in their jurisdiction. There were
| definitely other factors but top-down power was important in
| the weakening of those structures.
|
| I'm not necessarily for centralization, nor do I think our
| current system is good or has us on a healthy path by any
| means. I'm just not convinced stakes were lower in the early
| 20th century.
| rayiner wrote:
| I don't think there is any way to reconcile those things. If
| your primary concern is protecting individual rights in every
| corner of the country, you need centralization. And frankly
| you probably need to limit democracy as much as possible--
| which is what we did in the last several decades by having
| the Supreme Court take over many issues that other countries
| have decided by legislation.
|
| But there's no limiting principle to the above. You'd have
| more protection of individual rights in Europe if France
| could overrule Poland through undemocratic organizations like
| the ECHR: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-
| confirms-the-.... That would probably trigger devastating
| political consequences, however.
|
| At the end of the day you have to make a decision about how
| much you care about democracy and self determination versus
| individual rights. I don't think that in 2022 we are striking
| the right balance on that.
| roenxi wrote:
| This might be a weird outcome of the inability of large groups
| to process nuance. Groups seem to struggle with the idea that
| things can be done one way in one place and another way in
| another place - and struggle in a way that individuals seem not
| to.
|
| Groups - even small government types, weirdly - seem to fall
| into a trap whenever something goes wrong. The answer to a
| challenge is "centralise power, then do things my way". Never
| mind that power is difficult to coerce, rarely does things your
| way and any mistakes made are standardised and amplified
| accross an entire country.
|
| I recall in the early days of the COVID crisis where the US
| banned working COVID tests (I forget if it was the CDC or some
| other government body) in favour of their own faulty one, which
| totally scuppered any chance of controlling the disease.
| Foreseeable outcome of the strategy. But despite that sort of
| thing being easy to pick, groups don't argue for parallelism in
| an emergency.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| This article is 100% wrong.
|
| Russia's misinformation campaign against the U.S. is 100% the
| cause of our current national discord.
|
| Our entire culture has been maliciously and actively poisoned by
| a _proven_ state sponsored attack on the U.S. and Western Europe.
| Everything in the past decade needs to be re-evaluated and
| filtered through the lens of Russian disinformation.
|
| Day in and day out, for over 10 years, the Russian government has
| been posting millions and millions of divisive and destabilizing
| messages online, amplifying the most controversial topics and
| creating true distrust and hatred among fellow Americans. Their
| efforts happened to occur along with the unprecedented rise of
| smart phones, which enabled this campaign conceived during the
| Obama administration, to have success beyond Russia's wildest
| dreams.
|
| Additionally, there have been thousands of spies sent to the U.S.
| in order to infiltrate Congressional and Presidential offices,
| military personnel and business leaders. How many Russian spies
| have you heard of? Last night I watched PBS Frontline where I
| learned of yet another one: the former CEO of Overstock's
| girlfriend was revealed to be a spy by the FBI (Maria Butina). He
| was the guy funding and pushing for recount efforts like in
| Arizona. I remember reading about her, but didn't realize the
| connection with "stop the steal".
|
| We need to respond. Aggressively and radically. We need to pardon
| the Jan 6th insurrectionists (I'm a liberal Democrat, mind you)
| and start a national campaign of de-russification. (As someone
| named Russ, I don't state that lightly. Haha. Sorry dumb joke.)
|
| The reactions to what I'm saying will be predictable:
|
| 1) I'm oversimplifying or exaggerating.
|
| I'm not. This is all fact.
|
| 2) I'm a liberal Democrat and I'm somehow trying to target
| Republicans because I hate freedom.
|
| I'm not spreading a narrative. I'm trying desperately to
| understand why articles like this from the Atlantic keep trying
| to explain the state of the country, when we already know the
| answer.
|
| When is the majority of the country going to realize we've been
| played and react appropriately??
| mathlover2 wrote:
| Wait, why pardon the Jan 6th people? Just because one's been
| mislead by misinformation to believe something false doesn't
| mean that they are blameless for flagrantly breaking the law in
| response.
| redmen wrote:
| You are giving too much credit to Putin. All he did was
| identify already-existing issues and fuel them further.
|
| Saying this: "The reactions to what I'm saying will be
| predictable" is a good attempt but doesn't really work I've
| found. Of course it's predictable, that doesn't make it
| incorrect.
|
| Yes you guys have been played, but if you didn't see huge
| growing divisions within the united States well before Putin
| started to use social media then I don't know what to tell you.
|
| I hope readers here can see that spammers and bad actors have
| been using social media to affect opinion for years and years
| before Putin was utilizing them to his benefit. You guy set up
| a system that became doomed.to fail. Trump and Putin are just
| catalyzing an already-collapsing system.
|
| I understand that you are angry, it comes out in your text. But
| the way out of this is not to add more fuel to the fire unless
| you want to speed up the natural process of a decaying empire.
|
| Everyone loses faith in their empire eventually. You see it in
| the increasing selfishness, fear and greed, no?
|
| Killing Putin won't do much at this point except to temporarily
| satisfy the anger.
|
| An analogy to me is the USA is sick and Putin is just an
| opportunistic parasite. A strong, healthy host would be able to
| defend itself.
| redmen wrote:
| To add to this.. Us Americans I don't think understand how
| many other parts of the world don't like us. If you want
| evidence of this go travel, and see how people treat you,
| then watch their eyes light up if you tell them you are a
| Canadian and not American.
|
| If it wasn't Putin it would be someone else eventually. You
| can't win the whack-a-mole game forever.
|
| Let's say we could repeat things without Putin. Facebook and
| Google and tech companies would have kept growing naively,
| making it easier and easier to break the system over time.
| Eventually some team somewhere would infect social media and
| use it against the USA.
|
| It is inevitable in my eyes. I think us humans make the
| mistake of thinking history happens because of the names. It
| doesn't.
| subliminalpanda wrote:
| https://archive.ph/zTzYh
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| For some reason archive.ph does not load for me today.
| the_optimist wrote:
| Because we've massively overinvested as a society in trivial meta
| navel-gazing like The Atlantic, and massive underinvested in
| technically knowledgeable conversation, teaching, and execution.
| quantified wrote:
| That's actually a big part of the article's thesis. Were you
| intending to snark that aptly?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| > Congress should update the Children's Online Privacy Protection
| Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood
| (the age at which companies can collect personal information from
| children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while
| making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should
| be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held
| responsible for enforcing it.
|
| That won't change anything if parents keep buying smartphones for
| their 10 year olds.
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| That epic headline deserves a better article beneath it.
| mathlover2 wrote:
| This is the dumbest thing I have seen come from Jonathan Haidt.
| If social media is this powerful a destabilizer of societies, I
| wonder how Haidt explains first world countries like Germany,
| Canada, and most of the rest of the planet that have social media
| but haven't fallen into the same sort of divisiveness the US has.
| zht wrote:
| we are getting there in Canada
| quantified wrote:
| They may not be as dumb as the US is?
| pzduniak wrote:
| Pretty much. If you look at other EU countries, social media
| was essential in dividing the populations and promoting
| populist, nationalistic and xenophobic parties.
| mathlover2 wrote:
| Was social media the cause of the division, or did it
| merely allow people to exploit existing problems?
|
| Assuming that social media is a primary factor, for the
| sake of argument, the solution to this problem isn't
| regulating the platforms via Haidt's proposals (which I
| should add seem to be too limited in effect). Instead, we
| should decentralize the platforms into protocols. While
| this will still allow stupid people to go into echo
| chambers (like with any forum or blog online) it will also
| limit their reach by depriving them of a singular place for
| a giant number of people to hear them all at once.
| redmen wrote:
| We can spend forever debating this, or we can use our
| common sense that anything Zuckerberg touches is bad for
| society and probably causing deep rooted issues.
|
| Look, we can spend hundreds of years debating over which
| foods are bad for us and which are good, or we can just
| use our common sense and cut out sugars and bad oils.
| That'll solve 90%.
|
| Why waste time waiting for glacier-speed science to
| figure this out when we have this common sense. Stop
| anyone on the street and ask them if they think constant
| notifications, scrolling, phone addiction and apps like
| tinder, TikTok and Instagram are good for our brains.
|
| I'd be sad if people didn't unanimously agree that it's
| poison
| rayiner wrote:
| Odd comment coming the day after far right and far left
| candidates won more than half the votes in the French
| presidential election, with the center left and right
| collapsing and centrist Macron getting under 30% (despite
| having moved significantly to the right on cultural issues).
| mathlover2 wrote:
| France has its own issues as well, in many ways parallel to
| the US from what I have heard, with a sharp urban-rural
| divide and a legacy of colonialism that has largely not been
| addressed.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I mean yeah if you dismiss or downplay the issues every
| other country has, the US looks unique. But that's not
| exactly meaningful right? Also, considering what's
| happening in france, do you agree that your original
| comment was not accurate?
| echlebek wrote:
| Canada isn't immune from this, just look at these moronic
| displays. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-
| politics/22926134/canada-truc...
|
| This idiocy was all organized on social media. The convoys are
| overwhelmingly unpopular among larger Canadian society, but
| social media allowed them to organize in an echo chamber.
|
| No comment on Germany, but I would be betting on things being
| similar there, not different.
|
| My personal theory is that before social media, a lot of the
| people involved in this would have been bullied or shamed into
| not doing this by their peer group. But social media lets you
| set your peer group without geographical restrictions.
| mathlover2 wrote:
| It isn't immune, but it certainly hasn't gotten to the point
| it has in the US. We had a failed insurrection two years ago
| that killed 5 people. The truck convoy was a bunch of morons
| thinking they could get their way by going to Ottawa and
| being absolutely obnoxious --- and ultimately failing because
| no one wanted to put up with their shit.
|
| Social media is _a_ factor. It 's not the _main_ factor, and
| Haidt 's weird focus on it rather than deeply entrenched and
| growing economic disparities, lack of education in the US,
| the rise of the religious right, and other factors is in my
| view kinda silly.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Canada literally had to suspend the charter and due process
| by enacting the emergency measures act, which is
| unprecedented amongst western countries. Why would the
| government do that if no one supported them anyways?
|
| Your insurrection did not kill 5 people by the way. I get
| that there's a weird urge to make that event some sort of
| insanely important historical moment but it doesn't mean
| you have to make up dead people.
|
| Ironically, from a neutral outsider view, what happened on
| the 6th of January can also be described as "a bunch of
| morons thinking they could get their way and being
| absolutely obnoxious". It doesn't look that way when you
| are knees deep in american partisan culture wars, but
| Americans have a tendency to think that anything that
| happens in the US is exceptional and unique.
| redmen wrote:
| Canada has massive division. It's just masked.
| mathlover2 wrote:
| In the US the division is arguably worse and the masks are
| coming off.
| redmen wrote:
| Haha agreed
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