[HN Gopher] Reality is just a game now
___________________________________________________________________
Reality is just a game now
Author : 1sembiyan
Score : 271 points
Date : 2022-10-07 11:23 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thenewatlantis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thenewatlantis.com)
| theonemind wrote:
| Large topic that I can't do much justice to in an HN comment, but
| the prophet/town-crier on this one seems like Ian McGilchrist:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western-e...
|
| 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.
| tristor wrote:
| 1. Probably, but not provably.
|
| 2. Almost certainly, but perhaps not necessarily.
|
| 3. Most likely false
|
| 4. IDK/C
|
| 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| "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."
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| seventytwo wrote:
| Stop conflating "reality" with "perception".
|
| 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.
| Koshkin wrote:
| 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.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > 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_.
| seventytwo wrote:
| Yes, this is what I was getting at.
| datadata wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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.
| datadata wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| My answers are a mix, I guess.
|
| 1) Possible but I don't know
|
| 2) Very likely
|
| 3) Very unlikely
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > 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.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| 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.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > 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.
| aliqot wrote:
| 7. This is a unique take
| fallingfrog wrote:
| 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.
| aliqot wrote:
| It doesn't matter what I think happened.
| seydor wrote:
| 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.
| Roark66 wrote:
| 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).
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
|
| Also, this is a good start:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
| breck wrote:
| Dammit I hate articles like this. Really long but a skim reveals
| obviously very enlightening so now I need to budget time in the
| day to read.
| prionassembly wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
| ttpphd wrote:
| 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.
| jollyllama wrote:
| 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.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| 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.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| 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.
| nathanyz wrote:
| 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.
| yalogin wrote:
| 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.
| brooklyndude wrote:
| Missed the most obvious outcome. We are in a VR simulation. We
| see more "clues" everyday.
|
| Now how to work within the VR world handed to us. That's the next
| steps. Soon to become apparent I'm sure.
| implements wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| lm28469 wrote:
| > obvious
|
| How so ?
| j_k_eter wrote:
| 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.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| > 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.
| lm28469 wrote:
| I can read your words but I have no idea what your point is
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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.
| sprkwd wrote:
| If I'm in a VR simulation, why on earth did I wish to be me?
| Wouldn't wish that on anybody.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Maybe our real personas are into the challenge? Or the fresh
| inspiration of feeling pain?
|
| Imagine being a painless immortal -spending 80 years in one
| of our dying bodies might be fun to us.
| guerrilla wrote:
| This was Alan Watts' final religion actually; literally
| that.
| mbg721 wrote:
| Being in a simulation doesn't necessarily imply that you're
| there by choice.
| varjag wrote:
| Wish...? You're enduring a punishment!
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| ABraidotti wrote:
| Your conclusion exemplifies the essay's argument that we pick
| facts that confirm our most compelling narrative.
| meltyness wrote:
| 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.
| Philorandroid wrote:
| 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!
| [deleted]
| dalbasal wrote:
| 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.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| > 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.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| 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.
| kardianos wrote:
| This series on reality is socially interesting but misses the
| fundamental question: Is it True?
|
| It muses on the social creation of why people think differently,
| but fails to ask: How can we know something to be True?
|
| I give an alternative: Seek Truth. Be humble.
| williamcotton wrote:
| 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.
| kardianos wrote:
| Language is a tool that enables communication. Clear
| communication with common vocabulary is required for good
| communication.
|
| So long as we agree that "The world around you is true." then
| we can work together.
|
| Yes, be humble (know that you can be wrong or partially
| wrong). But do not be tricked into being timid or impotent.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| What level of certainty do you need to assert something is
| true?
| [deleted]
| smallerfish wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
| smallerfish wrote:
| Fair enough / TIL on the origin.
|
| 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?
| kragen wrote:
| Well, that is true.
| kardianos wrote:
| The problem isn't with language; that is how a Dialectic
| thinks.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Sure, it's more a thought experiment than a serious
| proposal.
| kardianos wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| 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.
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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?
| imiric wrote:
| 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?
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/53498434
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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:
|
| https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-clear-pill-
| part-1-of-5-th...
|
| ---------------------------
|
| 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.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58647975-viral
|
| 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.
| mberning wrote:
| #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.
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Relevant on the topic
| https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy...
|
| >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
| whalesalad wrote:
| always has been .jpg
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| 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.
| nailer wrote:
| 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.
| eterevsky wrote:
| I got "don't know" for 3 of these questions and "it's
| complicated" for further 2 and "probably no" for 2 more.
|
| How can you give definite answers for factual questions in which
| you don't have full information?
| joenot443 wrote:
| 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
| _____?"
| Loveaway wrote:
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| bsder wrote:
| > The answer to all of the questions is: "Who the f* knows
| and why should I care?".
|
| A whole lot of people thought this.
|
| Then the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
|
| Now, they the f* knew. And they knew why--because they
| suddenly couldn't get medicine or medical care.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| 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.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| 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
| tacitusarc wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The important questions are down. Those are just examples to
| frame the discussion into something real, instead of letting it
| float as abstract concepts.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| 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.
| im3w1l wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| >I would prefer is that these people are given the tools to
| find the truth on their own
|
| You have a high degree of trust in humanity's capacity for
| rational thought, don't you?
|
| That trust is misplaced and will backfire if you ever have
| to rely on it
| anigbrowl wrote:
| > 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > 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!
| ripe wrote:
| > 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.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| 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.
| tacitusarc wrote:
| I think that's my destiny. No, really.
|
| 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.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| j_k_eter wrote:
| 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
| andy_ppp wrote:
| 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.
| sophacles wrote:
| I see that you are trying to increase divides and create
| anger and hate. Why do you do that?
| zackees wrote:
| williamcotton wrote:
| Silicon Valley gamifies social interactions resulting in social
| interactions behaving like people playing some strange game.
| helen___keller wrote:
| 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)
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| 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.
| JTbane wrote:
| 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.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| 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.
| ggpsv wrote:
| 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?
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Considering that 99.9% of the people arguing on the internet
| have 0 influence on international performance, I'd say no.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Actually these people arguing on the internet have quickly
| become very adept at organizing, shaping the news, electing
| candidates, etc.
| imiric wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep21052
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Good question comrade #9246546.
| swayvil wrote:
| The modern popular epistemology is a flaming garbage trainwreck.
|
| We speak with certainty about things we never saw. We put our
| faith in the opinions of people we never met.
|
| Now get back to work.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| 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.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| 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.
| Dudeman112 wrote:
| While I agree that the epistemology is shite, there actually is
| a limit to how much you can do by your own self
|
| Not everybody has a large hadron collider on their garden
| ilaksh wrote:
| Check out "The Righteous Mind" by Haidt.
| williamcotton wrote:
| > Of course, QAnon followers think that their world is the real
| world, whereas ARG players know they are in a game.
|
| In an MMORPG, what kind of characters do not know they are in a
| game? Non-player characters?
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| williamcotton wrote:
| I'd watch that movie!
| greenhearth wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| "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
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Don't forget food, water, and the sweet ass gold
| photochemsyn wrote:
| And, from about 1905 onwards, that dirty, dirty crude oil has
| been fought over relentlessly.
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| land is basically access to food and water. Remember for most
| part until 1800 or so taxes were paid in food
| somenameforme wrote:
| Let's take two hypothetical scenarios:
|
| ---
|
| 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!
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| If I follow malthus law, I would say we would have less war
| in the first
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_growth_model
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Why follow something that has been repeatedly shown to be
| false when applied to humans?
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| 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.
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| 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).
| watwut wrote:
| > resisting NATO encroachment on Russia,
|
| 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.
| dalbasal wrote:
| Different sides of a polyface coin.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| mise_en_place wrote:
| 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.
| mstipetic wrote:
| Or you can take over the media and repeat the same message
| over and over hitting the emotional keys in our monkey
| brains. Propaganda works very well.
| Bouncingsoul1 wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| danielschonfeld wrote:
| 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.
| frgtpsswrdlame wrote:
| 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
| tjnaylor wrote:
| "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.
| zackmorris wrote:
| _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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
|
| But hey, that's just an externality, who cares.
|
| 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.
| projektfu wrote:
| 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. --
|
| 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.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| 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.
| Tarsul wrote:
| 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.)
| gamegoblin wrote:
| 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.
|
| Is there something I am missing here?
| [deleted]
| sleepymoose wrote:
| >We're probably conservatively talking $10,000-100,000 USD per
| household
|
| Considering how many people are struggling to pay the rent and
| keep the lights on (myself included), this feels impossible.
| olalonde wrote:
| > 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.
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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.
| kragen wrote:
| This is a really good article.
|
| 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.
| aihkas wrote:
| 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.
| djitz wrote:
| The author is clearly referring to the time immediately
| following 9/11, which is by far the most united these states
| have been since WW2.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Most of the problems today can be traced to the Bush
| administration, and the aftermath of 9/11.
|
| I'd argue many larger problems trace back to Nixon than Bush.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| 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_
| raydiatian wrote:
| Yeah I got about four paragraphs in. I asked to read an
| article, not a novel
| marzell wrote:
| Were you mislead somehow?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _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.
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >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.
| pdpi wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| Swizec wrote:
| 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.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| 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).
| wsinks wrote:
| 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.
| chrisabrams wrote:
| > 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 ;)
| DJBunnies wrote:
| The super bowl that year had ~82 million viewers.
| anthk wrote:
| Soccer had 5 billion viewers across the world.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| For a single match? This feels like comparing apple to
| oranges.
| anthk wrote:
| Yes.
| lab14 wrote:
| Wait until OP hears about FIFA World Cup viewership.
| kuschku wrote:
| And Eurovision, with 200 million+ a year even more ;)
| superlopuh wrote:
| 4 billion people watched QEII's funeral worldwide
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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.
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| kingkawn wrote:
| 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
| neogodless wrote:
| > The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone
| moved to newspapers to printed national and global news
|
| Can you confirm there's a typo in here? Do you mean "moved FROM
| LOCAL newspapers to"?
| imchillyb wrote:
| His meaning is clear with contextual clues.
|
| The telegraph killed local papers that only printed local
| news.
| ssss11 wrote:
| And in many cases YOU don't actually choose - these 'smart'
| (read: stupid) algorithms infer what you want to see. I hate
| that.
|
| I think we will look back on this period in dunbfoundedness at
| what we allowed big tech to do.
| cageface wrote:
| This is the argument Postman makes in "Amusing Ourselves to
| Death":
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
|
| 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.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| 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.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| 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?
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
|
| And speaking of shared experiences,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqZsoesa55w has been watched 11
| _billion_ times.
|
| However, I suspect 10 billion of those may be my kids ...
| news_hacker wrote:
| This. It's east to be fooled by the illusion of choice and
| customization.
|
| Just see what happens to other markets in maturity, e.g.
| food: https://bigthink.com/technology-
| innovation/10-companies-own-...
|
| I still see the spirit of what the OP is saying, though. At
| least the AI will know if I like my Kraft Mac-n-cheese extra-
| creamy or dry.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I had never seen that video before.
|
| 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...
|
| Maybe Armageddon isn't such a bad thing.
| bombcar wrote:
| I had actually expected the "most viewed YouTube video" to
| be Despacito but I checked and was surprised.
| opan wrote:
| I was expecting Gangnam Style.
| basch wrote:
| 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.
|
| Im a broken record with how often I cite this article, but
| any chance I get where it is relevant it is worth exposing
| people to. And this thread is that moment. https://www.bbc.co
| .uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...
|
| 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.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > 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).
| hultee wrote:
| Great article! Thanks
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| > _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.
| ericd wrote:
| 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.
| vjk800 wrote:
| 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.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| 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.
| nullstyle wrote:
| I assure you, I can start whistling baby shark and get more
| people to recognize it than I could if I started whistling
| the MASH theme.
|
| Baby shark is most definitely a shared experience.
| karmakaze wrote:
| I've never heard of Baby shark, and watching the video
| can't recall ever hearing the tune. You may be living in
| a bubble, or we all are.
| Kiro wrote:
| That's one of the most outrageous comments I've seen.
| Surely you must be trolling.
| nullstyle wrote:
| We all are; mine is clearly bigger than yours.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Parent bubble I assume :D
| nullstyle wrote:
| Uncle bubble ;)
| v-erne wrote:
| 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.
| usefulcat wrote:
| I think my kids learned the song from other kids; I'm
| doubtful they've even seen the video(s). I know I
| haven't.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I don't even have kids and I know the song because I know
| people with kids.
| lizardking wrote:
| 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.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| 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.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| 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.
| nullstyle wrote:
| 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").
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| >a unified pop-cultural zeitgeist created by having
| cultural expression gatekept and controlled by a few
| broadcasters and media conglomerates
|
| What makes you think this has changed?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-
| followed_Twitter_...
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| > 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.
| krapp wrote:
| 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.
| nullstyle wrote:
| > 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?
| bombcar wrote:
| Arguably maybe not war, but Baby Shark does talk to what
| a family is seen as, somewhat.
|
| Doo dooo dodo dodo
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It is shared if it the people reached it through the same
| memes, and took a similar conclusion. Time isn't relevant.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| 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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| lamontcg wrote:
| 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.
| couchand wrote:
| 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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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 risque.
| standyro wrote:
| 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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Certainly, I wasn't trying to imply that kids these days
| don't or can't have such experiences.
| dlkf wrote:
| This is grossly misleading. That is one kind of recommender
| system, but there are many others.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| And those buckets can very much already be found IRL.
| godmode2019 wrote:
| 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.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| 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.
| mikkergp wrote:
| > 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?
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >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.
| aschearer wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://apnews.com/article/andrew-cuomo-
| resigns-17161f546bb8...
|
| [2]: I trust no citation needed.
| ravel-bar-foo wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| > 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.
| watwut wrote:
| 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.
| mikkergp wrote:
| 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.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| 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.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| > 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.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| 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.
| masswerk wrote:
| > 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| mintaka5 wrote:
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| 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.
| swayvil wrote:
| Here are 2 statements. See how they sit with you.
|
| Reality, beyond the local, unless you travel a lot, only exists
| as a media fiction.
|
| The bigger reality, the world beyond the local, is more important
| than the local. Because the bigger reality is bigger.
| sph wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| meltyness wrote:
| 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...
|
| how do those places look?
| sph wrote:
| I am not American, and I do not know my neighbour's name. I
| think it's terrible and sadly I'm not the only one living
| like that.
| jhbadger wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| greenhearth wrote:
| Except it was investigated and nothing like this was
| determined.
| masswerk wrote:
| 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."
| pessimizer wrote:
| > the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 have been found in Laos
| and Vietnam (BANAL-236, BANAL-52) and not in China
|
| Is this supposed to be evidence for or against?
| masswerk wrote:
| This is meant to counter the idea of ARS-CoV-2 being
| somehow derived from RaTG13, which is still around.
| 4bpp wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| > I rarely see the same type of rigour or skepticism being
| applied to the natural-origin hypothesis
|
| Isn't the natural-origin the default assumption? There are
| no lab-leak theories for polio or smallpox as far as I
| know.
| 4bpp wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| 4bpp wrote:
| 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!).
| hotpotamus wrote:
| This makes me wonder - is it possible to prove that it
| was _not_ a lab leak?
| 4bpp wrote:
| 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, ...
| masswerk wrote:
| Mind that there are studies that mean to prove a natural,
| spontaneous origin at the Wuhan wet market.
|
| E.g.,
| https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/covid-19-originated-
| at-...
| 4bpp wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| 4bpp wrote:
| 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?
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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...
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
| masswerk wrote:
| 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".
| 4bpp wrote:
| 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?
| standardUser wrote:
| 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.
| jahewson wrote:
| Who's to say what we "should" do? Our nature is what it is.
| standardUser wrote:
| 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.
| TobyTheDog123 wrote:
| 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.
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