181–190 of 504 posts
A contrarian take focuses on the increasing specialization of knowledge and the increasingly fine-grained international division of labor, which has had increasing impact on a government that fails to keep up. A rough history of that: In the 1700s the Western democracies established nominally omnicompetant, unspecialized legislatures. In the last 1800s, given the increasing specialization of knowledge, the first comm…
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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.
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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.
But it's not from Greek mythology is it? It's always Christian mythology that is used in these sort of openers. It's almost always the default goto here. What lessons can we draw from the good book today?
The lesson we fail to draw every single time is a masterclass in humility.
It looks like every human era has its anxieties. Suddenly many of us got widespread access (if we dared), not only to 'all knowledge' (such as it is) including all of human history (much previously covered-up or lost), but to what's going through everyone's minds (and ever has). Bound to blow some of them. Biblicly speaking, "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not grasped it."
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Instead of talking about the dangers of anonymity, I think we need to reframe the argument in terms of the dangers of social credit score. I don't mean dangers from authoritarians, of course. Everyone understands how the Chinese system is terrible, for instance. I mean the dangers of a "natural", "emergent" social credit score. The kind that you get for free when you attach a way to establish who is who to otherwise…
> Move to anonymous or pseudonymous boards immediately and never look back except in grave, To accomplish what you describe here, you need to go beyond "anonymous" and "pseudonumous" boards, to completely untagged boards. You don't know me, but you (can come to know) my moniker "PaulDavisThe1st". This is just as much of an identity to build trust upon as whatever may actual name is.
If all you're risking is your karma by being outed as a deceiver, that's probably not enough for someone to trust that this is sufficient incentive to keep you honest. By extension, they no longer trust what you write.
That said, what you mean by untagged is what I meant by anonymous.
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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.
Canada is 72.9% European white and Gini is 0.728
The U.S. is 60% non-Hispanic white and Gini is 0.852
These numbers don't capture everything (e.g., distribution going in to Gini is important), but they do capture a lot. I think the conversation could do without the race-baiting, too :-(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Demogr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_Unit... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada
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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.
[0] A little while back I was at my parents' house and they had Fox News on in the background (of course) and I noticed that this has now gone so far that everything at the bottom runs with a big "FOX NEWS ALERT" tag and all the trappings that come with some kind of urgent announcement—for every little mundane thing, no exceptions.
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…
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.
Are you intimately familiar with modern life in the US and (Germany/Canada)? Because divisions you see from the inside might not be obvious from the outside.