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Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

theatlantic.com

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Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#91

Post by jkhdigital »

judge2020 wrote: post #74
sweetbitter wrote: post #48

> Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a platform spreads your words to millions of people, it has an obliga…

> running servers or at least using infrastructure run by fellow human beings, rather than consuming content from a handful of global feeds susceptible to these social Sybil attacks. Basically nobody used the internet for social interaction back then. Now that nearly everyone has the internet[0] and we've experienced a large shift of social interactions moving to tiktok/snapchat/twitter/FB, we have to deal with misin…

> we have to deal with misinformation campaigns by overseas operatives

Don’t forget the misinformation campaigns by our own intelligence agencies! They’ve been practicing for like 60-70 years so they’re pretty good at it.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#92

Post by rayiner »

Spooky23 wrote: post #79
roenxi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a weird outcome of the inability of large groups to process nuance. Groups seem to struggle with the idea that things can be done one way in one place and another way in another place - and struggle in a way that individuals seem not to. Groups - even small government types, weirdly - seem to fall into a trap whenever something goes wrong. The answer to a challenge is "centralise power, then do things m…

“Small government types” are a fraud. That stuff is just chum for the masses. Wedge issues like guns, abortion, etc are designed to break traditional democratic constituencies from the herd. Catholic priests were leaders of socialist revolutions in Latin America. In the United States, some catholic bishops were in favor of child separation due to abortion.

I think you’ve got this backwards. Social and cultural issues—different people’s conception of how to preserve freedom, when life begins, how to socialize their children, God, etc.—are always important to people and always have been. What precipitated the independence war that created my country was a language movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language_movement

It’s the insistence on ideological uniformity on these fundamental issues that creates the “wedge” between people who might otherwise cooperate on relatively mundane economic issues.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#93

Post by rossdavidh »

mung wrote: post #81

Somewhat amusing that the article starts off using a parable from the bible. Maybe it's more amusing to someone outside the the US.

If it was a parable from Greek mythology, would it be less amusing? I don't think you need to be Christian (I am not) to find it an apt metaphor.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#94

Post by jkhdigital »

mathlover2 wrote: post #15
echlebek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada isn't immune from this, just look at these moronic displays. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22926134/canada-truc... This idiocy was all organized on social media. The convoys are overwhelmingly unpopular among larger Canadian society, but social media allowed them to organize in an echo chamber. No comment on Germany, but I would be betting on things being similar there, not different. My personal the…

It isn't immune, but it certainly hasn't gotten to the point it has in the US. We had a failed insurrection two years ago that killed 5 people. The truck convoy was a bunch of morons thinking they could get their way by going to Ottawa and being absolutely obnoxious --- and ultimately failing because no one wanted to put up with their shit. Social media is a factor. It's not the main factor, and Haidt's weird focus o…

> a failed insurrection two years ago that killed 5 people.

I’m not sure what’s nuttier, the actual event itself or the fact that people still call it an “insurrection”. Either way, you are doing a good job of (unwittingly?) providing evidence for your own points, I guess.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#95

Post by lioeters »

tharne wrote: post #57
mathlover2 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US the division is arguably worse and the masks are coming off.

> In the US the division is arguably worse and the masks are coming off. You sure about that? As recently as 1995, Canada was with 0.4% of a vote to split the country in two. In the 1970's the deputy Premier of Quebec was kidnaped and murdered by Quebec separatists. In 1990 the Canadian and Quebec governments used the military and authorized lethal force to put down an armed rebellion by the Mohawk tribe, after a Can…

Interesting that you mention the Mohawk tribe and their protest, I just learned about it earlier today from watching the film Beans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oka_Crisis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beans_(2020_film)

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#96

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

jkhdigital wrote: post #84
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution. I'm theoretically in favor of this, but ... one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist. No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. The federal government can (or could,…

> No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence. Regulatory capture is much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured.

Regulatory capture is indeed a problem. But it's a hand-waving assertion that it's "much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured."

This sort of claim seems to me fundamentally rooted in some specific ideas about large human organizations, specifically of the governmental kind. One of the key ideas it requires to be true is that the corruption endemic to small-scale institutions (think your local mayor, perhaps (depending on your state) even your governor) will automatically apply to much larger scale institutions (such as those administered by the federal government).

I'm not going to deny that this could be true - it clearly could. But the change in scale, the change in mechanisms of influence that are required, the change in the possible side-effects of such corruption being uncovered ... these all point in the opposite direction, in my opinion.

Amazon and Walmart are not the victors in a game of regulatory capture. They are the beneficiaries of the election of senators, representatives, presidents and the appointments of judges who explicitly do not believe in much regulation. Even so, they are subject to more oversight than one of my local ranching families in NM, who can get a (former) governor to re-route millions of dollars in state & federal funding to a road they would prefer.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#97

Post by rossdavidh »

While I am a big fan of Jonathan Haidt, and have read several of his books, I can't help but feel that this is written from a point of view that is entirely too impressed with (if also afraid of) technology.

Peter Turchin predicted escalating levels of polarization in the US, reaching a peak around 2020, without any need to look at social media. The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's. I also think he's more impressed with AI-generated content than is warranted; unpaid zealots can crank the stuff out in more than enough quantity.

Turchin blames elite overproduction; it seems a much more fundamental issue than social media. Haidt even provides evidence for that here:

"These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society."

Now, don't get me wrong, I am no fan of FB or Twitter, but I don't think Haidt's take on this is accurate. The stupidity of current discourse uses social media, of course, because that's the dominant media, but I don't believe they caused it.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#98

Post by zozbot234 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #96
jkhdigital wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence. Regulatory capture is much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured.

Regulatory capture is indeed a problem. But it's a hand-waving assertion that it's "much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured." This sort of claim seems to me fundamentally rooted in some specific ideas about large human organizations, specifically of the governmental kind. One of the key ideas it requires to be true is that the corruption endemic to small-scale institu…

Corruption at all levels is far more "endemic" to large organizations than small ones. It's also less visible, because size correlates with a lack of transparency.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#99

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

jkhdigital wrote: post #84
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution. I'm theoretically in favor of this, but ... one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist. No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. The federal government can (or could,…

> No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence. Regulatory capture is much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured.

Regulatory capture doesn't seem like it applies to Walmart... How regulated is discount retail?

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#100

Post by ngngngng »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #12

> Congress should update the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which unwisely set the age of so-called internet adulthood (the age at which companies can collect personal information from children without parental consent) at 13 back in 1998, while making little provision for effective enforcement. The age should be raised to at least 16, and companies should be held responsible for enforcing it. That won't c…

So prosecute a few of them
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