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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

#261

Post by hattmall »

lovich wrote: post #226
nradov wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why one faction of conservatives "want to reduce [the federal government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Progressives see that notion as dangerous because they consider the government as an essential tool for solving serious problems that ruin the lives of real people. But their successes will be short lived if an expansion of government power leads to a long t…

Is reducing the federal government to that size not committing to the long term disintegration of our country? When you have states passing laws making it illegal for you to do something in another state that is perfectly legal within that second state, ala the abortion laws places like Idaho are trying to pass, how is the a cohesive nation?

You can frame it the same way too as states making things legal that are illegal in other states. But that's kind of the whole point of states, is for them to be different. It's not actually disintegrating the nation, it's providing choices. The problem comes when states use the federal government to attempt to override other states. If each state can just do their own thing and as a country we focus on prosperity, mutual aid and defense then our similarities bring us together more than our differences push us apart.

Each state is supposed to be different. Diversity is wealth. The disintegration is the forcing of everything to be the same.

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

#262

Post by IIAOPSW »

endominus wrote: post #243
IIAOPSW wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woul…

I'll snipe you a bit harder. In the event of a hung jury, the case can be retried (aka the distribution resampled). Practically though, no prosecutor wants to redo the same case over and over. So its safe to assume that 2 hung juries is as good as charges dropped.

I'm glad you enjoyed this problem, both as a riddle and as a neat demonstration of how a societal system can be better (more fair, just) than the underlying society that builds it.

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

#263

Post by hihihihi1234 »

grapeskin wrote: post #162
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, th…

Look up "bleeding Kansas"

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

#264

Post by baud147258 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #228
TimTheTinker wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Is bigger government more able to do this? It already has the power it needs -- the legislature can outlaw undesirable corporate behaviors, the justice department can pursue litigation (including antitrust litigation), and fed…

You need a government with enough heft to take on a corporation that has decided to ignore the law. If you think you can get heft via "better", go for it. History doesn't give me much reason to be optimistic. "The problem with corruption, inefficiency and stupidity in government is corruption, inefficieny and stupidity, not government."

> You need a government with enough heft

Governments have the monopoly on the use of legitimate force on their territory (and the means that go with it). Isn't that enough heft to go after any corporation?

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

#265

Post by kansface »

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…

I disagree. Social media as now implemented are Darwinian black boxes optimized to evolve the most contagious memes, because engagement is stupidly easy to optimize for compared to any sane metric. As it turns out, the things we share the most when encouraged to do so are finely distilled vitriol. Moderated tone is critically important and good faith in disagreement is vital to a conversation. Twitter, is instead, the digital equivalent of literal shouting. It doesn’t really matter what exactly random strangers are shouting about in my estimate…

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

#266

Post by pjerem »

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.

Oh no, the rest of the planet isn’t immune to this. We, in France, will choose our next president in two weeks between a man who spent the last 5 years breaking all the public services he could or an openly fascist woman.

The EU countries just have more social safety nets that renders them more socially solid. So we are not doing as bad as America right now but don’t be fooled, the trend is the same one.

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

#267

Post by barrkel »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #219
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,…

> 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. Is bigger government more able to do this? It already has the power it needs -- the legislature can outlaw undesirable corporate behaviors, the justice department can pursue litigation (including antitrust litigation), and fed…

Beggar thy neighbor policies require higher level coordination to escape. E.g. tax competition between states to attract large companies, which not only reduces public funds but also disadvantages smaller local companies, is hard to prevent without agreements between states, or policies at a superstate level.

Replace taxes with permission to pollute, or worker rights, or other regulations, if you don't see a problem with tax competition. The point is that competition in practice reduces the sovereignty of the population of smaller government units.

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

#268

Post by hattmall »

chrisbrandow wrote: post #175
grapeskin wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, th…

It seems clear that the central issue of slavery transformed over 50 years from a general agreement that it was less than ideal and would go away in its own, to a deeply polarized issue which half the country thought it an abomination that should be immediately eliminated and the other half began to to think of it as a positive good for the slaveholder and slave. It was more regional than our current disputes which a…

That's just not what happened, slavery wasn't a main topic for the average person. Even in the south where there were slaves most people didn't own slaves. The debate around it did exist but it was an infrequent topic. Much much more common was discussions regarding import and export issues and transportation networks. Support for the poor and insane were big issues. Religion and temperance we're far more debated than slavery.

There's a lot of places to read newspapers from that time period online and you can see what topics were frequent and divisive.

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

#269

Post by mise_en_place »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #148
inter_netuser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The west hasn’t seen proper austerity yet, just barely warming up. Maybe soon.

> The west hasn’t seen proper austerity yet, just barely warming up. European Troika (EC+ECB+IMF) debt induced Austerity literally _caused_ deaths in the heart of Europe. [0] This pretty much seems like 'proper' austerity unless you feel that we need perestroika living conditions for austerity to be real. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/08/31/the-t...

The austerity will come when yields spike to 10%.

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

#270

Post by linuxhansl »

I am reminded of various quoates throughout my life:

1. "The human mind avoids nothing as much as thinking." -- Unknown, quoted by my dad

2. "We used to agree on the facts, and than argue about what do do. Now we simple disagree on the facts" -- Friend of Mine

3. "The quickest way to release stress hormones from the brain, unfortunately, is to 'beat' up someone else." -- My therapist

(1) Leads to humans always gravitating towards an explanation that reliefs them from thinking. Simple, short, populist messages are perfect for that.

(2) Has us end discussions before we even get to talk about what to do.

(3) Has us make feel good when we can "beat" up someone else on social media.

IMHO, it is bringing these three together in social media, and more importantly doing so mostly subconsciously, that makes this so toxic.

Edit: Layout

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