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

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

#161

Post by JimTheMan »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #156
mathlover2 wrote: post #5

This is the dumbest thing I have seen come from Jonathan Haidt. If social media is this powerful a destabilizer of societies, I wonder how Haidt explains first world countries like Germany, Canada, and most of the rest of the planet that have social media but haven't fallen into the same sort of divisiveness the US has.

They're more homogeneous in almost every way, including wealth, race, culture. They're also smaller.

Homogenous is simply not true, outside of say Japan or China.

It's a popular trope thrown mostly around by Americans, and is sometimes (often) a dog whistle for racism.

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

#162

Post by grapeskin »

rossdavidh wrote: post #97

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 la…

> The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's.

I know this is in the context of the build up to the civil war, but how much were neighbors at each other’s necks? I don’t know much about that period aside from the obvious events that followed (slavery being the huge and obvious motivator for the war), so I’m not sure how divided everybody was.

But it seems like in the US today, the divide is spread across the entire country. Nearly everybody is aligned with either A or B group and agrees with nearly straight down the column with that group’s general viewpoints. Some areas lean A or B, but you’ll always have someone vehemently against the other group no matter where you go. I don’t think the US today would have a north-south divide so much as it would a political party divide.

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

#163

Post by jdkee »

nr2x wrote: post #152
rossdavidh wrote: post #97

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 la…

Facebook is mentioned 19 times, Fox News once, and talk radio zero. This is a very techno deterministic argument that utterly fails to acknowledge the main source of misinformation and division is boring old tech like cable news and radio. The main role Facebook serves is to make Fox and radio personalities more accessible.

Fox News and conservative talk radio have existed since the early 1990s yet the extreme polarization in American life didn't begin until ~2010, which appears to prove Haidt's point.

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

#164

Post by egberts1 »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #70
oh_sigh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is safe to say that more independents means less partisanship. If people are going independent because they see themselves as somewhere between Rs and Ds, then sure. But if they go independent because they think the Rs are not right enough, or the Ds are not left enough, then that is only an example of magnifying partisanship.

I view the "independent" label to actually just mean "my party isn't part of my identity." Most "independents" consistently vote for one party, they just aren't married to it in principle.

Or them non-partisans merely vote for what they like.

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

#165

Post by rektide »

rektide wrote: post #83

Random scribbling here, but, i feel like America has been the idiots wearing the dunce cap ongoingly for a long time. But we're finally seeing some real world events & consequences across the world that mirror our internal battle of values, seeing what heavily regressed shelted "anti-political" naivety & other declared antipathys & worse maledictions happening on the world stage look like, far & wide. It feels like t…

> We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress.

100% one of my favorite books to have run into as a youth, a great great materialist philosphy book.

Feels like a very weirdly reductionist take thought, making mock rather than taking seriously what cooperation enabled. There's scant recognition of what zero sum systems are, of how cooperation moves things out of stagnant points into better.

Such a loved text & tbis article starts off paying some respect, but ultimately missing the point so so bad, only starting to re-entertain human possibility.

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

#166

Post by groby_b »

jdkee wrote: post #163
nr2x wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is mentioned 19 times, Fox News once, and talk radio zero. This is a very techno deterministic argument that utterly fails to acknowledge the main source of misinformation and division is boring old tech like cable news and radio. The main role Facebook serves is to make Fox and radio personalities more accessible.

Fox News and conservative talk radio have existed since the early 1990s yet the extreme polarization in American life didn't begin until ~2010, which appears to prove Haidt's point.

Uh, no, it does not prove his point in any way. For that, he'd need to establish any causal link, which he utterly fails to do.

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

#167

Post by andrewclunn »

natsup123490 wrote: post #117

I have to speculate that the reason why "social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general" is oftentimes because it highlights their apparent failings (biases, lies, etc). That is, the problem is not primarily one of people failing to trust in trustworthy institutions, but due to a hyper-focus (retweeting) on the failings of those institutions. As we communi…

Telling these institutions that if they want more trust, that they should earn it, is missing the point. The entire reason for ensuring trust in an institution is so that you can then cash in on it. It's marketing. The notion that these institutions were ever trustworthy is the remnants of whatever messaging you've internalized from them.

The freer expression and archival powers of the internet allow for people to see through the scam more and more. The division is hardly "right" and "left" (having almost nothing to do with economics). It's cultural at the low end, but higher up it's about trust, and whether one feels that institutional authority can or should be trusted at all.

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

#168

Post by redmen »

redmen wrote: post #26
russellbeattie wrote: post #20

This article is 100% wrong. Russia's misinformation campaign against the U.S. is 100% the cause of our current national discord. Our entire culture has been maliciously and actively poisoned by a proven state sponsored attack on the U.S. and Western Europe. Everything in the past decade needs to be re-evaluated and filtered through the lens of Russian disinformation. Day in and day out, for over 10 years, the Russian…

You are giving too much credit to Putin. All he did was identify already-existing issues and fuel them further. Saying this: "The reactions to what I'm saying will be predictable" is a good attempt but doesn't really work I've found. Of course it's predictable, that doesn't make it incorrect. Yes you guys have been played, but if you didn't see huge growing divisions within the united States well before Putin started…

Just watching the score of this post go up and down is interesting how controversial it is I guess??

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

#169

Post by barry-cotter »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #65
rayiner wrote: post #11

Haidt makes an excellent observation about the mid-20th century unity being an aberration due to the technology of the time: > Gurri is no fan of elites or of centralized authority, but he notes a constructive feature of the pre-digital era: a single “mass audience,” all consuming the same content, as if they were all looking into the same gigantic mirror at the reflection of their own society. Something I think we o…

> 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

Why not? You can’t ban a specific company from operating but if you want them to act or stop acting in a certain way pass a law. If Australia can make Amazon pay Goods and Services Tax so can any of the states. Oh wait, they did that already.

If they want to target a specific company for actions or inactions that are not generally illegal they can amend the constitution to make bills of attainder legal.

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

#170

Post by [deleted] »

redmen wrote: post #150
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if the greed is not coordinated, it's not going to pull an organization in a unified direction. Yes, I agree that you can see examples in some parts of the world and in some time periods (including today) where even uncoordinate corruption is very damaging to a society. But - and this is important given the context in which I started talking about this - it does not appear to be a pathway to regulatory capture no…

Maybe only a unified direction towards dysfunction lol But yes in the context in which you have laid down you are correct I believe.

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