Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by infogulch » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:00 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #149

redmen wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be corruption at all levels without coordination. Example: greed. There is such a thing as unorganized corruption. Example, in lots of third world countries where their infrastructure and systems are so bad it breeds corruption. No need for a top down version of it.

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…

> But if the greed is not coordinated, it's not going to pull an organization in a unified direction.

Greed won't direct an organization in a unified direction, but that just exposes a vulnerability where an outside party can exploit the greed at an individual level to direct the organization in a unified direction of its choosing.

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

#232

Post by lovich » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:00 AM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #196

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.

I don’t know why Fox gets all the credit. I distinctly remember watching MSNBC in the early 2000s during the Bush era and it was surprisingly… centrist. Most of the stuff that passes for news today would have been considered radical.

Their scale. Other news sources may be guilty of the same behavior, but Fox News has the largest audience so its natural it has the largest amount of criticism.

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

#233

Post by redmen » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:01 AM UTC

russellbeattie wrote: post #75

pessimizer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the country is that the bulk of it has retreated into paranoid fantasies.

I totally agree. What I'm pointing out is the reason they're all paranoid isn't something natural. It's a result of Russian disinformation campaign. Many of the people who got fooled will go to their graves believing that the election was stolen, etc. We have to accept a certain portion of the populace is a lost cause. However, everybody else who isn't completely delusional needs to understand what's happening. My ho…

Hasn't it happened many times throughout history? It might not appear natural as we can identify a direct cause of it.. But who's to say it wouldn't happen in some other form with different actors if it didn't happen with Putin?

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

#234

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:06 AM UTC

topkai22 wrote: post #216

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,…

You need to change the incentives of the federal government (specifically the congress) to be in more in favor of localism. In 1900, senators were (at least partially) still appointed by state legislators and the local political parties held far greater control over their nomination process. Those mechanisms had their own issues with corruption and were replaced by more democratic processes, but they made members of…

You'll have to forgive me. I live in a small population state (NM). I trust my local politicians far less than I trust the 3 or 4 we send to DC. When I lived in a larger population state (PA) the situation wasn't much different.

The distrust of large national institutions is, IMO, a result of more than a century (or two!) worth of campaigning by the capital class to try to limit the belief in the virtues of the federal government. I consider the mere existence of this campaign (both overt and covert) to be another piece of evidence that the capital class regard the power of a strong federal government as a threat to their wealth and power. I also find it notable that I never hear anyone arguing for a stronger state government, but not odd because it fits with the general theme: rich people should be left alone to do whatever they want with the assets they control.

I've said many times here on HN that back in the 1960s there was widespread interest in a part of what was then called "operations research" that focused on how to improve the behavior of large human organizations whether they were governments or private. Sadly, that interest faded, and now we just accept private organizational malfunction without saying much, and government organizational malfunction by repeating conservative, "small government" tropes.

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

#235

Post by zo1 » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:06 AM UTC

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #205

jdkee wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something else happened around 2010 -- we elected a black president. Frankly that made a lot of people lose their minds. I think there's a lot of folks out there who don't mind black people exactly, but absolutely abhor the idea that a black person might be in a position of power over them. Witness the commentary from the far right on the new Supreme Court Justice: "Your children and your grandchildren are going to h…

It's kinda hard to untangle, unfortunately. Like to contrast your point of view about people not liking to see a black person in power over them: perhaps a black person in a position of power was the catalyst by inciting racial discord (not just among whites, but black people too). I wouldn't be surprised, as a black person he was expected to promote issues affecting black people.

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

#236

Post by kortilla » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:08 AM UTC

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #134

zozbot234 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don't agree. Corruption "at all levels" requires coordination and/or a common stance towards it. Finding that in an organization of 3 people is not always so hard; finding it in an organization of 30k people is almost impossible.

No it doesn’t. It only requires a small group to agree to be corrupt.

As the organization increases, you are more likely to find people who can band together to collude to corrupt some small corner of it. Number of corrupt candidates increases, number required does not.

Amazon only needs to lobby one federal legislature’s members and only need to battle one federal regulatory body. If all of the power were at the state levels, it would have to scale that up 50x.

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

#237

Post by asdff » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:09 AM UTC

titzer wrote: post #176

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…

I feel like Alvin Toffler was already onto something in Future Shock (1970). The modern world is just too interconnected and things are changing too fast. We're constantly thrust into ambiguous situations, exposed to a flood of information beyond our capacity to process, and grievances of the historical past pile up and rub against each other because there are no borders, no boundaries. Careers, ways of life, communi…

So much stress we have is stuff we just put upon ourselves. Oh man I better pick up or else my partner/parent/boss will scold me. I have to put on nice clothes to go out, I can't look like a slob. I am made to feel bad about how I look. I am forced to spend the day sitting and thinking instead of out foraging and using my legs and eyes. I have an insatiable need for ever more material goods thanks to the science of addiction being applied to marketing. I exist as a warmbody to generate disposable income for another to take, I merely hold currency transiently in its passage towards some inevitable black hole of wealth.

IMO society is almost like this behavioral disease. It's no wonder we are so depressed, when it is so very different from what we have evolved to live by: a life of foraging, working on personal survival, and raising kin.

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

#238

Post by brewdad » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:09 AM UTC

ouid wrote: post #186

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think the wholesale abolition of identity is probably too unpopular to be viable, and that the goal is accomplished with a sufficient reduction of identity. What counts as sufficient is anyone's guess, and probably too important to be left up to guesses, but I suspect that not allowing you to link an actual identity to the thing sufficiently dampens trust as to be sufficient. If all you're risking is your karma by…

It's a tough nut to crack. There is genuine utility in being able to follow the respondents in a thread like this. I'm responding to u/ouid but will the next reply to this be from u/ouid or someone new who hasn't been a part of the conversation until now? This alters the dynamic of how the conversation continues to flow.

Of course, once you place a tag of any kind on someone's posts, you can begin to build a profile that destroys any anonimity. Perhaps a randomly generated number that persists in this article's comments but resets to something new on the next one? That gets unwieldy in a hurry and probably still allows the site operator to build a profile.

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

#239

Post by upsidesinclude » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:09 AM UTC

travisgriggs wrote: post #191

> Recent academic studies suggest that social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general. The author uses the term social media here in this statement without much differentiation. Elsewhere though, he has differentiated “old school” social media from modern “social media.” I think he should have made that more clear here. He expressed earlier that the effect…

+

That's an interesting take. I have found myself using 'social media' lately in an unsatisfying way, exactly because it fails to describe anything at this point.

If anything it is synonymous with 'communication' anymore

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

#240

Post by watwut » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:10 AM UTC

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…

> You are giving too much credit to Putin. All he did was identify already-existing issues and fuel them further.

Yes. But also, fuel on fire makes much worst fire and possibly explosion. While the exact same fire with no fuel could be stopped or would stop. And it will be actually interesting to watch what will happen with politics abroad as Russia will have less money.

Putin was shelling money and supported not just parties in America. And I really want to see what will happen with fascist anti-democratic parties in both Eu and America as Russia gets weaker and weaker. At minimum, they will have less resources, which should weaken them.

> Killing Putin won't do much at this point except to temporarily satisfy the anger. An analogy to me is the USA is sick and Putin is just an opportunistic parasite. A strong, healthy host would be able to defend itself.

I dont think this is accurate. Putin is strongman in Russia, changing strongman means change of policy. Things will change, you just dont know how. And quite likely, it would lead to scramble for power among Russia elite and a lot of disarray. Putin is not just opportunistic parasite. Just like Hitler or Stalin or any other leader, he shaped things quite a lot. He was not magician to create everything he wanted, but he absolutely create situation in Russia as it is.

Putin was president for 20 years. The return to ussr methods is very much his doing.