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

#241

Post by inglor_cz » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:14 AM UTC

random314 wrote: post #115

rayiner wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uniform…

That's a Republican narrative, not really backed up by any sound historical analysis. Whereas creation, nurture and development of wedge issues is a standard right wing tactic across the world. Be it love-jihad in India, miscegenation in USA, jewish hatred in nazi Germany or recognition of Ahmediyas as muslims in Pakistan. It incentivizes voters to vote on ideological lines while ignoring/ letting politicians/wealthy…

Are there any legitimate wedge issues in your opinion, or is just everything artificially made up?

Your take feels very cynical, along the lines of "religion is opium for the masses". In this view, people are dupes stringed along by Machiavellist figures, who cannot possibly have strong feelings about various topics themselves.

Gun laws may not be very relevant in India, but neither are caste-related topics in the USA. This is normally called a different culture.

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

#242

Post by upsidesinclude » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:21 AM UTC

ouid wrote: post #116

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…

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…

As regards mathematics, if you are willing to endure the proof then relying on the algorithm as a mechanism of trust is not required.

Physics is mostly the same. But kind of not

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

#243

Post by endominus » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:22 AM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #69

giraffe_lady wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Differences in world view are less significant when the bureaucrats and executives with power over your life live nearby instead of in another city and state. How do you reconcile this with jim crow-era terrorism, for example? The movements were local and very loosely organized on even a regional level, but the bureaucrats wielded incredible power over individuals in their jurisdiction. There were definitely other…

Institutions are error correction. If more than a certain threshold percentage of the population is straight up violently racist, no amount of quality institutions can recover signal from that noise. Suppose x% of people will vote to convict a black man no matter the evidence, and the remaining 1-x% have a y% chance of erroneously voting to convict irrespective of race. At what value of x do you expect 2/3rds of wron…

Got nerd-sniped hard by this. The basic question is simple; given a random person in the population, what are the values of x and y such that the chance that they will give a wrongful vote are 2/3? Obviously, we can see that y = ((2/3) - x)/(1 - x). A simple enough graph shows that the racist population would have to be surprisingly high to fulfill that condition; even a 20% die-hard "convict on race" population would still require the other 80% of people to similarly erroneously convict almost 60% of the time.

It becomes more interesting when we consider juries. Juries, as far as I know (not being American), require unanimous agreement to convict. A jury consists of 6-12 people. To find out if a jury will convict, we have to find the probability of every single person in that jury wrongfully convicting. The formula now is y = ((2/3)^(1/{6|12}) - x)/(1 - x). At this point, either x or y have to be very high for 2/3 of wrongful convictions to be black. Even when x = 66%, y still has to be above 80% for the 6-member jury to convict wrongfully that many times. This is, of course, assuming this is a perfectly mathematical scenario and we aren't dealing with real humans who will vote to convict because everyone else is doing so.

The error, then, is probably more due to humans being likely to fold their convictions under peer pressure than merely a high percentage of them being rabidly racist. If people adamantly voted their conscience in juries, and refused to be swayed by the deliberation of their fellow jurors, we would have many more hung juries and many fewer convictions.

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

#244

Post by suction » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:22 AM UTC

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.

I can only speak for Germany, but Social media here still is much, much less widely adopted than in the US, because sharing one's life with strangers is culturally not as well regarded as it is in the US. This also applied before social media - telling one's life story to strangers was just not done. Now, this is changing for younger generations, but even they are still not nearly as willing to share as their American counterparts.

It may just be a matter of time but here the Q-Anons and other divisive, Anti-Democratic groups are still more fringe than over there

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

#245

Post by watwut » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:23 AM UTC

redmen wrote: post #159

russellbeattie wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> huge growing divisions within the united States well before Putin Of course I'm not saying Russia created our national schizophrenia, which stems literally from the birth of the nation, but they sure as hell helped exacerbate the condition. Russia deliberately amplified and inflamed the culture wars so that they could corrupt and weaken the US from within without being noticed. From fake online accounts, to financi…

I agree with you. And yes I could and probably am manipulated to an extent. But... I have noticed this before 2016. Years before. Example of bad American institutions: physical therapy, high schools, colleges for physical therapists. Food. Look at how horrible people eat in America. You'd expect the best country in the world to have a little bit more education when it comes to their bodies and the filth (food, pollut…

But also, American kids dont do that badly in international tests. They are not the very bestest best. But everytime there is debate about how bad American schools are, I check the stats and ... they are fairly normal on average for democratic world. The only unique thing is American expectation that they should be totally first in everything and anything less then that is failure.

> Look at how horrible people eat in America. You'd expect the best country in the world to have a little bit more education when it comes to their bodies and the filth (food, pollution, information) they put into them.

America is the leader of the world in talking about food constantly. Obsessing about it. Going to extreme with diets and making up ones again and again. America does not need more of that. It maybe needs to stop assuming it is and must be "best country in the world" in everything and be willing to learn from elsewhere.

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

#246

Post by isaacimagine » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:24 AM UTC

lovich wrote: post #229

nradov wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rogan claims to have voted for Barack Obama twice. That's pretty typical for a moderate leftist. He gives his guests a chance to express a lot more nuance than you see in mainstream media channels. Most of the criticism comes from people who haven't actually listened to many episodes all the way through, and just rely on biased takes from critics or short quotes taken out of context. I also used to have a negative op…

Youre skipping the criticism of his guest list. He's had Bernie Sanders on what, once, twice? Then he's had no other major leftist political figures or commentators but has has loads of extreme right wing figures including crackpots like Alex Jones. Joe Rogan can claim he is a moderate leftist all he wants, but his guest list on JRE does not support that

If I'm conservative, but my friends are liberal, am I a liberal? Or maybe I'm not a conservative, and they're not liberals: we all hold different nuanced opinions based on our own life and personal experience. Binning someone based on a subset of the company they keep is dismissive at best and purposefully malignant at worst.

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

#247

Post by basisword » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:36 AM UTC

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…

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

Every time I see this I just think it is peak “American exceptionalism”. You had a small group of red necks, who had what could barely be described as a riot, who walked into the government building and vandalised it a little. It was not an “insurrection”. That is language that was used specifically to create more division and fear.

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

#248

Post by rtpg » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:37 AM UTC

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…

But from the very basic metric of not wanting people to have bad things happen to them, when you see promoters of state powers intent on using it to tear down civil rights as fast as possible, strong state power in the current political environment seems like a major regression for many people in the country.

OK sure, some people want more local power. Why? Lower taxes? Or maybe because they don't like Oberfell or Casey.

It's important to look at consequences of changes.

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

#249

Post by freshhawk » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:41 AM UTC

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…

Elite overproduction does seem a much more sensible focus here.

If you want to blame the internet, then the obvious path is the "shared story" angle. There was a single mainstream dominant narrative for a while, but it couldn't hold up to the public talking directly to each other all the time, it was too full of holes and too clearly mostly a bunch of bullshit (remember the internet era before these "turning points" was heavy on the 'debunking' stuff).

So the elites are fighting over who gets to attempt to put in place the new official narrative (and many hope to make it a dominant narrative again but that seems far fetched to me).

It seems ... very obvious. I guess the problem is that my story depends on the old narrative being a constructed untrue thing and that's too "unamerican" of me?

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

#250

Post by TaylorAlexander » Tue, Apr 12, 2022, 6:41 AM UTC

oceanplexian wrote: post #203

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…

Collectivism, by definition, requires the use of force against people who aren’t complaint with the “collective”, so it requires violence. It’s a lot easier to commit violence against people when you can outsource it to someone else, so collectivism requires a strong, central authority. The less local that authority is, the less culpable we can convince ourselves we are when it goes wrong. The reason we keep building…

You can absolutely have voluntary collectivism where you simply do not do things unless everyone agrees upon them. This works best in small or medium sized groups and probably does not work for large groups, but your post reads like you think collectivism always necessitates violence and that simply isn’t true.