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

theatlantic.com

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

#291

Post by spupe »

DoItToMe81 wrote: post #283

Social media companies encourage manufactured outrage by providing controversial and divisive 'extreme' content for "engagement metrics". We know this from the Facebook leaks, court cases and common sense. The solution to this suggested in this article is to give them more power over individual information by making giving your name and address to the company mandatory. No thank you. I don't think expanding one of th…

If anything, enforcing identification would be very damaging to these companies. Their user numbers are absurdly inflated by bots and fakes, and most of their engagement is also likely not coming from human activity. The author is not proposing a solution for people in oppressive regimes - those are already restrained in their access to internet and social media -, but for America.

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

#292

Post by ZeroGravitas »

The title has a very "make America great again" vibe. When exactly and in what way was the past better?

> One result is that young people educated in the post-Babel era are less likely to arrive at a coherent story of who we are as a people, and less likely to share any such story with those who attended different schools or who were educated in a different decade.

A consistent set of lies told to our children while they are impressionable? I'm not sure I'm willing to mourn that without some extraordinary evidence that it's causing harm. I don't really see the connection to social media, and the decades long battle over teaching evolution suggests it's not new.

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

#293

Post by spupe »

kansface wrote: post #265
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, th…

Yes. At its core, the issue with social media is that it amplifies "engagement" at the cost of anything else. It is impossible to breed socially productive ideas, in the allegory you describe, if your only focus is infectiousness. What you are left with are literal mental viruses that take up our collective mind space, leaving nothing in return.

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

#294

Post by lifeplusplus »

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…

Completely agree I went from we should be two nations to federal govt should much less powerful one way to get started is remove federal tax and instead have states collect all taxes then pass it to federal government

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

#295

Post by octoberfranklin »

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…

> Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized

You can even do this with mere taxation rather than needing the full power of regulation.

Graduated corporate income tax.

Instant diseconomy of scale. That's a good thing.

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

#296

Post by rmbyrro »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #131
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…

> Social media allows us to highlight and amplify the information about our disagreements. In theory. In practice most people are too busy living their lifes and going through their struggles to voice anything. Leaving these platforms to be flooded by a vocal minority or worse, actors with an agenda. This in turn provides a warped vision of reality to the 99% of non contributing 'listeners'.

Isn't that a description of traditional media?

Doesn't seem this is a fundamental change that caused the current divide. It's something deeper.

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

#297

Post by nicoburns »

luciusdomitius wrote: post #289
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And what do you do if someone disagrees with the crowd? How do you force him without coercieon? (hint those two words are synonyms).

It would be possible to simply give up on the collectivism if someone disagrees and can't be persuaded otherwise. This of course limits where such collectivism can be found, but examples of this kind of collectivism do exist.

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

#298

Post by spupe »

tharne wrote: post #50

I'd say the first 10 years of the 21st century were a hell of a lot stupider. We blew a budget surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy. We started two wars that lasted the better part of 20 years, one of which was waged against a country that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Oh, and we didn't win either of them. We completely ignored the rise of China and any threat it posed, assuming all the while they'd become g…

That's not an appropriate comparison. You are talking about bad policies and political decisions, while Haidt is focusing on internal division and institutional erosion. The issue here is whether you will be free to see and declare the next war as a mistake, or whether the public space and political arena will be dominated by authoritarianism, fueled by the processes described in the article.

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

#299

Post by Fricken »

bobobob420 wrote: post #18

This journalist really wrote an entire article about facebook. Why is an essay needed to descibe obvious behaviour that everyone sees and can intuitely understand with their eyes. "In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse." ???? People didn't get stupider in the last decade. There is access to more information…

Individuals don't get stupider, but in groups they are plenty capable of regressing to collective idiocy.

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

#300

Post by lovich »

isaacimagine wrote: post #246
lovich wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m binning a talk show host who dabbles in politics into a political bin based on their political guests. Judging them on the people they platform is explicitly what you should do. This isn’t his private life with friends and family I’m judging him on. This is especially in light of the fact that he claims to be moderate because he “has anyone on” while his actions do not show that to be true.

I don’t mean to single you out, so please don’t take the next question as a personal attack but as curiosity. I’ve seen this argument pop up in the past few months that you can’t judge someone by their actions or statements or infer their beliefs based off of them. The reasoning has boiled down to either not taking into account their entire life or not being able to know their thoughts so I couldn’t possibly be able to accurately hold an opinion of them. Where did you get this belief/feeling or am I misinterpreting what you are saying?

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