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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

#31

Post by potato3732842 »

rsynnott wrote: post #3

> But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons. The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.

>The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.

The author has to say this because the consumers of the author's content would stop being right if the author was constantly dropping truth bombs like "being articulate doesn't make you right" they wouldn't get liked, retweeted, shared, and circle jerked about in the comment section on the front page of HN.

Literally every content creating person or company with an established fan base is in this quandary. If Alex Jones said "hey guys the government is right about this one" or Regular Car Reviews said "this Toyota product is not the second coming of christ" they'd hemorrhage viewers and money so they cant say those things no matter how much they personally want to. Someone peddling platitudes to people who fancy themselves intellectuals can't stop any more than a guy who's family business is concrete plants can't just decide one day to do roofing.

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

#33

Post by wnevets »

oytis wrote: post #32

I don't quite get the connection between the premise and the conclusion. Sure, influencers get rewarded by social media algorithms for polarising content, but most people are not influencers.

> but most people are not influencers.

they either get elected or appointment to the government

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

#34

Post by HeinzStuckeIt »

hexator wrote: post #15

Not sure what the point of this is other than to complain about being out of touch with the world. Too many people think "diversifying your information" means subscribing to whatever drivel they find on substack instead of, you know, following a diverse set of _actual journalists_.

Over the last many years, newspapers have slashed actual journalists in a number of areas: investigative reporting, arts, local news. A lot of those actual journalists have moved to Substack in order to maintain some kind of career writing about the subject they love.

For me, the tragedy of Substack isn’t that it consists of purely unserious people. It’s that fine journalists go there because, with the death of open-web blogging, there’s a feeling that there is no where else to go. And then, once there, they start to pick up all kinds of bad behaviors that both Substack the for-profit corporate owner and its culture of writers and commenters encourage.

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

#35

Post by hexator »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #34
hexator wrote: post #15

Not sure what the point of this is other than to complain about being out of touch with the world. Too many people think "diversifying your information" means subscribing to whatever drivel they find on substack instead of, you know, following a diverse set of _actual journalists_.

Over the last many years, newspapers have slashed actual journalists in a number of areas: investigative reporting, arts, local news. A lot of those actual journalists have moved to Substack in order to maintain some kind of career writing about the subject they love. For me, the tragedy of Substack isn’t that it consists of purely unserious people. It’s that fine journalists go there because, with the death of open-…

That's true, the point I was making was that it's about you decide to trust with sending you news not just the outlet. The problem is that many people who are rightfully distrustful of traditional media end up following cranks. And Substack seems to be the place where the cranks hang out.

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

#36

Post by biophysboy »

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 irrelevant — the important thing is that large platforms are politically unstable.

The solution to this is to fragment the internet. Unfortunately, this is incompatible with the information economies of scale that underpin the US economy. In my opinion, our insanity is an externality of the information sector, much like obesity for staple goods or carbon dioxide for energy.

I don’t agree with these individualized how-to guides. I can turn my phone off and go outside, but I still have to live in a world informed by social-media sentiment.

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

#37

Post by MarkusQ »

mock-possum wrote: post #29

> The writer who says "this issue has nuance and I can see valid concerns on multiple sides" gets a pat on the head and zero retweets. Because I think at this point ‘both sides ism’ Is easily recognizable as a dead end rhetorical strategy. At best it’s an ignorant position, at worst it’s low effort engagement bait / concern trolling that actively sabotages progress.

The phrase/concept "both side ism" is a very clever bait and switch that, so far as I can tell, was designed to marginalize/discredit people who are trying to actually engage with the issues (instead of just toxically emoting), and it was avidly adopted and weaponized as such. By both sides.

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

#38

Post by hexator »

paganel wrote: post #24

> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent Where's the lie in that? Hasn't this lady read her Gramsci? Seems like she didn't. > Tech writer (Wired, TIME, TNW), angel investor, CMO I see now, for sure she hasn't read her Gramsci.

This person doesn't seem aware of their contradictions in both complaining about people not following diverse viewpoints and also downright dismissing any amount of self-reflection that might be coming from people to their left.

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

#39

Post by hexator »

y0eswddl wrote: post #27
rsynnott wrote: post #3

> But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons. The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.

Ezra Klein's book why we're polarized cover this a bit and basically studies show that intelligence level has little to do with what people believe and more so just affects their ability to defend whichever position they already hold.

Speaking of people who are very articulate and also very wrong.

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

#40

Post by jjk166 »

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 out of their way to look at the other side's argument, they come away even more convinced that the other side's argument is dumb because it is dumb, if it is assumed everyone is speaking the same language. People haven't all suddenly become insane, or dumb, or unreasonable; we've just taken for granted that people geographically close to us using the same vocabulary would mean the same things, and thus we never developed the skills to translate between people who are in fact living in wildly different worlds possibly in the same household. And much of this is by design - pointing out how dumb someone else is, and complaining about the burden of dealing with these dumb people, takes so much less effort than actually doing the work to build consensus and make changes.
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