981–990 of 1001 posts
How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?
Seeing things like this make me wonder how long it will be until the US splits into two roughly equal-sized countries.
How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?
Coup-o-meter is right on the line between "preparing for a coup" and "attempted coup" https://isthisacoup.com/
How is a bunch of unarmed people a coup? Yeah, storming the Capitol is a little concerning, but nothing's going to happen. The people that run that side are sheltered urban liberals and don't have the slightest clue as to what it would take for a US coup.
How did we arrive to this point where a huge chunk of the population is in one reality and another huge chunk of the population is in another reality? Segregation of information sources? Politicization of media outlets? Self-reinforcing social bubbles? A combination of all of them and more?
I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself. I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted. Guy in 2021 tells his…
The irony of this ahistorical claim is that it comes very close to "Make America great again".
Think about the Vietnam War. The civil rights era. The McCarthy era. The list is almost endless. The Civil War, of course. The US has almost always had major polarization. If anything, the internet reveals what had been hidden by the whitewashed corporate Big Three TV network monopoly, which was itself an historical anomaly.
You know the Pulitzer Prize for journalism? Well, Joseph Pulitzer himself was unapologetically partisan. As was William Randolph Hearst, et al. The whole idea of "objective journalism" is not much more than a naive blip.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I blame the internet. Back in the days before it, we had to learn to live with those around us, now you can just go out and find someone as equally stupid as yourself. I call it the toaster fucker problem. Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted. Guy in 2021 tells his…
I would add that the pandemic make us skip the part of telling friends. And the invention of twitter... most sane people don't talk. If they ever say anything, it is too common sensual to be retweeted. But if someone say something explosive it got exponentially retweeted. The character limit also eliminate the possibility of any nuance in position.
Celebrity: To be unknown or unreachable is to be invincible.
Pettiness: Completing the journey needs to provide the answer. Knowledge and discovery need to provide more than cynicism and irrelevance.
Cruelty: Empathy first made us human, practical telepaths. Criticism provokes people, poking mental burn victims. Fights devastates. Fighters eventually miss the people they just wholesale killed.
Ignorance: Force people to fix telephone poles. Spend decades ignoring their requests for mobile. Overnight fire them for not having mobile skills, a practical death sentence. Universal healthcare has wait times and job guarantees have relocation requirements.
What's the minimum you need to call yourself a government? People telling other people what to do all the time from far away? No matter what you stand for, your subject to your own laws, or else there is no law, just bullying and everyone should ignore you as best as they can. Laws themselves have their own rules. You can't tell someone what to do when you can't even do it yourself, like speak perfectly for one.
You do it. If it works, I'll look at it and start doing it myself too. If you mess up, best just to walk away. Leadership belongs to others, not just just you.
Honest question: does anyone think this would have happened if Twitter and Facebook did not exist?
Social media is a catalyst and internet is the mega-phone/amplifier which makes lot of things precipitate quickly than before.
https://twitter.com/byaaroncdavis/status/1346908166030766080 It looks like Defense Dept. denied DC's request for National Guard. Update: DoD denies the report, but says they haven't acted upon request.
Are there people here on HN that believe the election was stolen? I haven't seen any evidence, most of the lawsuits haven't borne fruit either. However, I also recognize that there may be blindspots/biases. I'd really like to hear from anyone who believes this, to present a cogent argument. I promise not to attack. I want to hear the argument from the other side. I also beseech the rest of HN to please refrain from a…
i believe so, but for reasons different from Trump's arguments. the key point is that the media was extremely supportive of Biden and not of Trump. the margin of victory was small in key states. so if the media was presenting an even-handed position and not doommongering the whole time, it seems quite probable that Trump would have won. so the argument is that the media elite has manipulated the population into doing…
It looks harmless, but our amplifying algorithms gave a voice and a platform that led to this event. They created huge echo chambers with different set of facts and realities for different groups.
If you look deeply, this is partly our fault.
I may get downvoted for this. HN also has this variant of voting algorithm, and in a way it is an echo chamber of “what we think is true”. Just look at all the extreme FB hate comments.
I don’t have good answers other than, we really really need to invest in fact checking technology that is open, introspectable and objective.
It is so easy to spread hate and half truths that look like real truths.
We humans are wired to get dopamine hits from surprising/extreme/unusual information. It excites us so we click. The algorithms amplify it. Done at the scale of billions of people, it changes the fabric of society.
While we as devs are merely making “integer count field in a database” and a “react view that shows items in an array sorted by counts” that ends up shifting what the viewers believe in.
We are what we read and share.