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The Anxiety of Influencers

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Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when content gets expurgated because of blatant misinformation, it is taken as a sure sign of that source’s truthfulness. The difficulty is that it can mean either it's true and the authorities don't want you to know it, or it's false and they don't want you to believe it. Judging information either way based only on it being censored leads to error of two different types. Neither is correct thinking but plenty of…

> but plenty of people make the opposite mistake of trusting authorities In almost 40 years, my heuristic of trusting the government and ignoring anything being sold to me as “THEY don’t want you to know this!!” has worked out really well for me.

And as FOIA and declassifications have shown, trusting the government doesn’t work out well for the country. Ignorance is bliss

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#82
Reminds me of Calhoun's Mouse Utopia experiments: "Other young mice growing into adulthood exhibited an even different type of behavior. Dr. Calhoun called these individuals “the beautiful ones.” Their time was devoted solely to grooming, eating and sleeping. They never involved themselves with others, engaged in sex, nor would they fight. All appeared [outwardly] as a beautiful exhibit of the species with keen, alert eyes and a healthy, well-kept body. These mice, however, could not cope with unusual stimuli. Though they looked inquisitive, they were in fact, very stupid."

https://fee.org/articles/john-b-calhoun-s-mouse-utopia-exper...

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#84

Wow, the subject influencers in the article were insufferable just to read about. I can't think of any group I have less empathy for than them. The world would be such a better place if the concept of an "influencer" completely ceased to exist.

I don't know who calls them influencers other than the media. I just know them as social media narcissists.

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#87
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What beliefs do you have that aren't from experiences? Even analytic beliefs are things you believe because you experienced arriving at them. e.g. I believe 2+2 is 4 because of my experiences with math and calculation, in the same way I believe putting my hand on a hot plate might hurt because of my experience with hot things etc.

>Even analytic beliefs are things you believe because you experienced arriving at them? What about scientific beliefs? Only a handful of people can really understand (or to align with your phrasing, _experience_ understanding) all the evidence there is to support the Big Bang theory. Yet, a much larger number accepts it. And lemmas? I'm sure there are some lemmas I just use in proofs but have never proved from the fi…

You still learn those things, whether lemmas or beliefs about the Big Bang, from experience. You don't necessarily have the experience of deriving these things from first principles or from evidence yourself - someone told you, you read it in a book, etc.

How did you know who or what you could trust? Why do you believe in some books and not others? Again, your experience tells you which are more trustworthy. You have experiences that make you trust textbooks and so you trust the information you get by experiencing reading the textbook.

My point is really that it's absurd to claim someone only believes something because of their experience. Everyone believes everything because of their experiences.

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#88
post #14

> You’re trying to impress everyone who watches the video, and you want everyone to like it. This is where the race to the emotional rock bottom starts. What if those influencers become irrelevant in 10 years time and are replaced by another generation? The key here is to expand to other ventures. The ones who stay on the same platform for years will gradually become irrelevant.

What do you mean 'if'? They're about as disposable as toilet paper. They are created to be disposable and nothing is moderating that impulse at all. Hell, back in the times of Motown they made the child stars go to school. This is in some ways less organized than, but also less moral than, the music business and the film industry. And that takes some DOING, to be worse than the music business and the film industry. I…

I hope these kids will at least get some experience to enter show business with more of a chance of success.

Or maybe enough money (if they are wise, or their parents are) to dampen the effects of the inevitable transition.

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#89
post #21

Hope they have the brains to not burn their income as soon as it hits their bank accounts. This sort of popularity can surely not last more than a few years in almost all instances.

The lifestyle they're put into, of living in huge mansions, eating in fancy restaurants, partying at the hottest nightclubs, virtually guarantees that they'll burn every cent they earn just keeping up appearances, even if most of it is freebies or sponsored.

Re: The Anxiety of Influencers

#90

I'm a millennial and didn't really have social media growing up. I used Facebook for a little bit in college and then deleted it. It bothered me in my 20s that a lot of social things seemed to be closed to me because I didn't have some form of social media. Even though I had email and text I was somehow treated as if I was asking to be contacted on a fax machine or something like that. It's baffling. Every time I've…

> I wonder how this is going to turn out for those kids later in life. I just can't imagine being under the spotlight and dependent on external validation that much. It’s not just millennial who deal with this. LinkedIn is becoming inescapable… not to mention any advocacy for a “platform” as part of a resume

That's true, I hadn't thought of LinkedIn. But my experience on there was becoming so ridiculous. Maybe it's more helpful for people who are in other industries but I was getting tons of recruiter spam etc. But yes, it sucks so much when you're expected to be tied to a platform and that's not to mention the serious privacy issues with this.

As an unrelated irony a local meetup.com group focused on Inclusivity now has switched some Facebook video platform...Supposedly you don't have to have a Facebook account but I don't want to give it a try on Linux and all the privacy issues are there :/

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