71–80 of 307 posts
I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments and show them my own evidence that it's real (locating amateur radio satellites using data shared by people around the globe and demonstrating the doppler effect on them). The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And somethi…
I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments and show them my own evidence that it's real (locating amateur radio satellites using data shared by people around the globe and demonstrating the doppler effect on them). The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And somethi…
Even the most rational among us make plenty of irrational decisions or have contradictory beliefs.
We've replaced religion and witches with aliens, new age beliefs, flat Earth, reptile conspiracies, etc. I don't think it was that different a couple of centuries ago. I read in the book Supersense by the neuroscientist Robert Hood [1] that in a study that is repeated every year for the past decades, the percentage of people having irrational beliefs has remained constant. I don't remember the exact percentage but it was rather high. Something like 75%.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/SuperSense-Developing-Creates-Superna...
The negative technical tendency of industrial technology was weapons of destruction and machines for murder, which led us to world war 2, proving that the technical zeitgeist of industrial mechanics had surpassed its rationality and was no longer tenable. The negative technical tendency of information technology is the proliferation and rapid spread of misinformation which leads us to, well the present I guess.
> I am acquiring greater wisdom with age as I ought, but the average age of the typical person I encounter stays the same so they cannot keep up. I’m noticing the contrast increasing but misattributing it. My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but on the internet you probably are.
This has been my pet theory for a while now that I've seen people start to wake up to lately (perhaps I manifested it). How can one believe any discourse on the internet when the other person on the other end could easily be an unsupervised 9-year-old. For this reason, I'm terrified of the fact that Q-Anon has gained any traction at all.
In the past people believed in lots of stupid things like "god exists", "the poor deserves its situation and the rich has earned its situation", "hatred toward blacks, Jews, neighbor country, homosexuals, handicapped and many more", "kings are good and democracy bad", "the strong country has a right to invade the week country", "the rich are evil and the poor saints" and so one. So I think the idea that stupidity has…
> "the strong country has a right to invade the week country" Indeed they do. But not the month country. I mean, maybe they have the right to, but it'd be foolish. And invading the year country would be outright suicide.
My bet is on a variation of this. To some extent, we all target people to advance our goals, be it to get them hooked on our product, to get people to rally behind an idea or a policy we want, or perhaps to get ourselves elected to a public office.
Entities with more resources naturally invest more in this and have more advanced tools to get people do what they want. Most likely emotions work much better when targeting large groups of people than smartness and objective truth, so that's what we get.
I think it's nothing new, but the recent research advances and the ease of reaching out to people personally these day made it so that using people to accomplish your goals become probably the most powerful tool on the planet. Why build weapons or wage wars if you could just make people do what you want on their own will and also sing you praises along the way?
I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments and show them my own evidence that it's real (locating amateur radio satellites using data shared by people around the globe and demonstrating the doppler effect on them). The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And somethi…
I think there is too much information around for the average person to filter and process and digest. All three are important parts of living in a society and it looks to me like even with e.g. economic issues alone, it's just very hard for (to be fair) anybody to keep up. In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations. My theory, sort of.
Any sufficiently advanced technology (knowledge) is indistinguishable from magic -- Arthur C. Clarke
So people just see competing ideas as a choice between two forms of magic. Add in identity politics and hey presto, changing their mind means denying themselves (a rather difficult thing for most to do). Add in Dunning-Kruger, through no fault of their own, and then people think there is a rational reason for denying objective evidence. My evidence is better because your evidence is just your opinion.
> I am acquiring greater wisdom with age as I ought, but the average age of the typical person I encounter stays the same so they cannot keep up. I’m noticing the contrast increasing but misattributing it. My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but on the internet you probably are.
This has been my pet theory for a while now that I've seen people start to wake up to lately (perhaps I manifested it). How can one believe any discourse on the internet when the other person on the other end could easily be an unsupervised 9-year-old. For this reason, I'm terrified of the fact that Q-Anon has gained any traction at all.
I think you'd be able to spot a 9-year-old attempting to engage in "discourse on the internet."
However, I think it's common to engage with people who are in their late teens to early 20s, who are at the point in their lives where their intellectual self-confidence has increased far beyond where their actual understanding is, but they've yet to realize that. They're fluent enough with adult language that they're hard to spot, but they've basically only absorbed one or two big ideas which they mistake for the gospel truth of everything.
Humanities have been devalued and coopted by advocacy and the university has made its mission to please the customer, which is an increasingly emotional fragile late teenager who has been taught to demand a safe space.
I could go on, we all could go on, and it’s not funny at all.