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How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

#131

Post by welcome_dragon »

jjk166 wrote: post #40

The real grift has been in echo chambers changing peoples vocabulary such that we can use the same words but talk right past eachother, allowing extremely moderate positions to be reframed as extreme and making what ought to be minor disagreements unresolvable. People making an "I can see both sides" argument are completely missing the point - the issue is that most people can't see both sides, and even when they go…

Exactly correct on echo chambers. I say my opinion on something and I hear the exact same responses from pro people and the exact same responses from con people. Everyone hears it.

Repeating the same words someone else does to make yourn point makes me think the other person isn't capable of considering they might be wrong.

I disagree with saying "I can see both sides". That's another echo chamber. If I say I can reasonably see both sides of an issue, one side calls me an idiot and uneducated and suc h and the other goes straw man and how I'm a communist and/or Hitler. No. I can see why side A thinks the way they do and side B thinks the way they do.

I'm not talking about hot topics either.

I'm really starting to just want to get away from all society and/or just never have more than surface level conversations with people.

Re: How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

#132

Post by AndrewKemendo »

dfedbeef wrote: post #108
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes Both are significantly different but still fail to provide the most basic service: access to clean water I can trivially get access to plenty of clean drinking water in most “wild” places in the world, in fact that’s like the third core thing you learn in survival schools (of which I’ve attended many).

You're doing the thing that the article is talking about. Neither are average examples. I don't know about Tehran, but you have to really be cherry-picking to make a data set where Flint ends up as an average case of municipal water quality.

No it’s demonstrating that at the relative extreme ends you have the same problem thus creating the linear equation with the minimum set

The reader should deduce that any measure along the same linear map - which is effectively every city aka the “average city” - will eventually be subject to this condition (water insecurity)

You can trivially verify this by looking at issues of water insecurity and water quality issues across every size city. Notice that you will have non-trivial numbers of “boil water” events in the United States south. You may have significant periods of drought throughout your average city in sub-Saharan Africa, Sonoran desert or western China for example.

I think maybe your definition of “average” only includes modern metropolitan areas and not simply as cities where people are geographically clustering across the globe.

I lived in San Angelo Texas in 2009 and I did not have potable water in my home. I had to go to Walmart and fill 5 gallon jugs of Culligan water every few days. That’s not particularly abnormal

To be fair I offered a fairly complex/compressed way to approach this, so not easily interpreted, but nonetheless that’s the point

Re: How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

#133

Post by [deleted] »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #67

As a long time proponent of reasonable-ism I disagree with a lot of this. The assumption that a lot of our problems stem from 2 sides just seeing an issue differently is just nonsense in this day and age. The big Problem, is that one side has slid heavily into authoritarianism, and the other side is completely ill-equipped to fight it. On any particular issue, the right will say whatever gets them more Power, and the…

[deleted]

Re: How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

#134

Post by Karrot_Kream »

nradov wrote: post #73
biophysboy wrote: post #36

The main issue for me is the size of our platforms. If the owner of a platform tries to enforce a set of virtues, it will always be seen as censorship by a fraction of its users. That fraction will increase as the user base increases, as the alternatives diminish, and as the owners govern with more impunity. I personally think these loud users are immature, disrespectful, anonymous cowards, but my opinions are irrele…

A better solution to this would be to fragment within social media platforms. Allow users to post any content that's legal within their local jurisdiction. And give other users easy tools to create their own "filter bubbles" so that they don't see content which they personally consider insane or offensive. This would allow the social media platforms to sidestep political debates about censorship.

Then you get the other side of this problem, the echo chamber effect. If people self sort they'll eventually end up in social circles that are completely illegible from the realm of physical politics, which leads to a political instability of a different kind.

It's a hard problem. I think multi armed bandit based algorithms can help. Bluesky is a sort of "live" example of self filtering and it ends up creating a lot of fractional purity politics over which filter bubble is the just/moral filter bubble.

Re: How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

#135

Post by Arainach »

lazide wrote: post #103
Arainach wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the short-term min/maxing can leave you stuck in a particular global minimum, with no clear way out. Short term min/maxing leaves you in a local maximum (the opposite of what you said)

Local maximum != global maximum (usually). I said global minimum, which can easily happen if you end up at local maximum, but you’ll never know unless you randomly search elsewhere (and potentially end up even lower).

A local maximum by definition cannot be a global minimum. A local maximum has to be higher than things around it, which are part of the global space.

Re: How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

#136

Post by robot-wrangler »

volkk wrote: post #22
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #2

The author writes, “You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right”. Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue (e.g. pro-Ukraine to anti-Ukraine or vice versa) and still keep their following and ability to monetize it. Social media is full of parasocial relationships; followers are in love with an influencer’s…

the words we use matter a lot. the "pro" and "anti" anything is a pretty large reason why all discourse has become so stupid sounding and talking with people about any issue is enraging. nuance is dead. the cultural zeitgeist is being controlled by algorithmic feeds that create neuroticism (i am definitely affected), general anxiety, and anger.

My take on this is that persons are great, everyone should know a few. Groups of people on the other hand are, and always have been, genuinely pretty awful in almost every way. IMHO this is down to some really basic primate stuff that's just inevitable. Social media is a big problem because it makes it easier to create groups, and algorithms are a big problem because they essentially take all of the dynamics that would inevitably lead to conflict anyway, and accelerate them.

Groups, algorithms, and conflict itself are all things that lead to wicked problems. Each one tends to spiral, where the only solution is more of the same, and if you escape one funnel then you fall into an adjacent one. Problem: Some group is against me. Solution: Create a group to bolster my strength. Problem: People are fighting. Solution: Join the fight so the fight will stop sooner. Problem: My code is too complicated to understand. Solution: More code to add logging and telemetry. Problem: Attempting to add telemetry has broken the code. Solution: Time to start a fight

Re: How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

#137

Post by robot-wrangler »

cs702 wrote: post #94

More succinctly: The Nash equilibrium of public discourse on social media is extremism and polarization ... ... because for each individual, the way to get more clicks and influence is by becoming more extreme and polarizing. Sigh.

Exactly, so about that, there's good news and bad news. Epistemic and mean field game theory is eventually going to be well understood stuff and define better alternatives very, very specifically. After we understand our past completely AND can predict our future, we'll know exactly what to fix and how, but unfortunately nothing whatsoever will change anyway. Probably someone will weaponize it to actually make things worse! Cold comfort to be sure, but I personally will still sleep easier after I know exactly why we are doomed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1-OmAICpU

Re: How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

#139

Post by lazide »

Arainach wrote: post #135
lazide wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Local maximum != global maximum (usually). I said global minimum, which can easily happen if you end up at local maximum, but you’ll never know unless you randomly search elsewhere (and potentially end up even lower).

A local maximum by definition cannot be a global minimum. A local maximum has to be higher than things around it, which are part of the global space.

Fair point. However, the local maximum doesn’t have to be far from the global minimum.

If the global maximum is 10, minimum is 1, you could easily end up in a region with local maximum 2, minimum 1.

Re: How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

#140

Post by sizzle »

JohnMakin wrote: post #100
HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #2

The author writes, “You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right”. Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue (e.g. pro-Ukraine to anti-Ukraine or vice versa) and still keep their following and ability to monetize it. Social media is full of parasocial relationships; followers are in love with an influencer’s…

I have been a small content creator for 10 years now. I've been hampered a lot by actively discouraging these types of parasocial relationships - every now and then I'll get a gaggle of followers that spend entirely too much time on my crappy content or my personality/posts and I get extremely weirded out to the point I want to stop doing it entirely. Everyone tells me I'm doing it wrong, but I swear, 10 years ago it…

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