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In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

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Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#31
Claiming to imagine a workaround like "virtue" will solve the embedded primate bias inherent in our lossy signaling like words and narrative/causal statements is worse than wishful thinking, it's uniformed and positivist/idealist.

Humans like all primates, are easily deceived by arbitrary signals, which is almost all of our signaling. No narrative is true as it's always a construction reducing cause and effect to a local illusion. We're trapped in a highly competitive chain of subjective statements in news, history, politics, none of which find a legible scientific ability to correlate reality and other statements. Read any news story about murder. The story details the conditions for the murder as causal, but we know from science that not every condition the news describes ends in murder. The news is rather fantastical in that it pretends to explain the cause while denying the scientific reality of any event. This is simply what words and narratives provide. Grammar competes for attention and status, that's its primary function. To embed status, control, even manipulation PRIOR to the signal making sense or being true. That's fundamentally flawed.

Humans did not build a system for shared communication, rather for subjective statements that build value. That's an individual premise of survival, and it infects all of our signaling. This is the central tenet of evolution, and language does not evade it or provide a workaround. The idea we are collective in language is a fantastic illusion that this principle of evolution rigorously maintains at the cost of our collective survival. All the evidence supports this, from language dispersal, diffusion, to mistranslation or untranslatable, to lexemes. It's the arbitrary all the way down. Even the binary is about the individual before it's about the collective.

People have to confront what we built here.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2...

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#32
post #16

We never lived in a truth biased world. This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature. For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.

We lived at least in a consensus reality world, where most people with some basic education agreed on most things that were obviously true, and most people had a shared sense of the fuzzy boundaries of fact and opinion. We now do not, and it has nothing to do with power systems [0] and everything to do with a newfound facility to mislead at scale, which states and individuals alike will use. [0] except that elements…

Mosura is correct, there was never a consensus reality world. Consensus post-domestication is built from coercion into centers. This requires a steady diet of myth or religion that explains phenomena. If you think consensus is agreeing that this particular god made that lightning, then consensus is ultimately devolutionary. Myth is unfortunately the basis for causality: this statement stands in for the correlational phenomena we're witnessing. Once we were subsumed by myth, status and hierarchy became dominant to truth statements. Look at everything you see here, status controls statements and their validity. There's never a correlational reality accessible through cause and effect statements competing for domination. The myth never solves the phenomena, but kicks it downstream into what appear to be more accurate forms like news. But if you study news, history, law etc, these are mythic constructions that embed cause and effect locally, rather than solve the initial phenomena (like murder).

We have to face truth constructions are lures in folk science societies like ours, they are not valid. Science is not understood (correlational thinking) or accepted b a majority of the population anywhere on this planet.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#33
post #16

We never lived in a truth biased world. This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature. For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.

We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on. Now we live in a world where reporters care about their ability to mold what they report on to fit their preferred narrative.

Those two worlds are not equivalent.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#34
post #16

We never lived in a truth biased world. This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature. For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.

We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on. Now we live in a world where reporters care about their ability to mold what they report on to fit their preferred narrative. Those two worlds are not equivalent.

> We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on.

You only lived in a world where you couldn’t tell that they didn’t. All that changed is your awareness of their biases.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#35
post #4

Not only lack of truth, but lack of locality/relevance is an issue. You get flooded by info that you never need in your daily life or in near future. Every news channel would inundate you with global news as if all that is happening in your neighborhood. This is partly the reason why governments of the western world are forced to act on everything that happens on other side of the world. Because people feel that thei…

Er… is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be? Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy. And this is how news are being reported even before the rise of smartphones. And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. I just don’t see why you think that for those…

Global and foreign news is a good thing. But a lot of attention devoted to foreign stories of questionable relevance isn't a good thing.

One of my usual news sources is SVT, the national Swedish broadcaster. Their svt.se website is good and, aside from Swedish news, they're also quick to cover major foreign events, if something is breaking news they'll have it up right away. But one of my main complaints is SVT covers local American crime too much. It pops up as one of the top "just in" headlines. I went to look just before replying here, and it's actually happening again right now - there's a "just in" headline "Four dead in a shooting in Mississippi". It's fast, I don't even see it on cnn.com as I'm typing this. But, with all respect to the victims, mass shooting are pretty much a daily event in the US and generally have no global importance.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#36
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er… is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be? Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy. And this is how news are being reported even before the rise of smartphones. And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. I just don’t see why you think that for those…

Before, foreign news would actually include articles about politics in other countries, and their economies. As an avid news paper reader, I knew the prime ministers of bunch of countries, what party they belonged, etc. Nowadays, you have to be happy when you get an article about a national election. Foreign news has been reduced to trade conflicts, wars and gruesome murders.

With the internet what’s stopping you from actually reading the foreign news?

In the newspaper days there was greater professionalism due to money and prestige but I think part of the appeal is you never heard conflicting interpretations so it felt more true and less confusing.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#37
post #16

We never lived in a truth biased world. This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature. For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.

We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on. Now we live in a world where reporters care about their ability to mold what they report on to fit their preferred narrative. Those two worlds are not equivalent.

It’s that their narrative formation was so dominant and without alternative that it just felt true.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#38
post #27
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most people with some basic education agreed on most things that were obviously true Indoctrination. Part of it is to make you not see it for what it is.

Do you have examples of lies that the majority was indoctrinated to believe?

Belief in western liberalism and democracy

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#39

HyperNormalisation (2016) helped me frame the decline they (and we) allowed. The people at the top have been trending towards dumber, less conscientious, less hopeful, less moral, and more corrupt when it doesn't have to be this way; plus, it's easier than ever for billionaires and private equity to buy up corporate media and manipulate social media to shape narratives favorable to their interests. It's trending this…

I like American strategy of allowing views to be discussed but not let them affect Elite club's strategy. In this regard, China has failed. They should allow ample discussions about tiananmen square and strip away emotional value so that whenever these topics are brought up again they lose their relevance.

Re: In a post-truth world truth-seeking is more important

#40
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on. Now we live in a world where reporters care about their ability to mold what they report on to fit their preferred narrative. Those two worlds are not equivalent.

> We lived for a while in a world where reporters cared about the truth about the events they were reporting on. You only lived in a world where you couldn’t tell that they didn’t. All that changed is your awareness of their biases.

Nope. I mean, they always had biases, and they affected what they said, but much less so than today. Then they tried to not be affected by their biases, and now they don't.

So, while it's not binary, it's as I said before: The difference really matters.

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