I think a lot of people would agree 2 parties are nearly as bad as 1.
The rise in alternative voting methods I think is because people really want a third-party to do well but if we have A,B,C and you prefer C > A > B but A,B are most likely to win in a first-past-the-post scenario then by voting for C you're indirectly helping B (you're least favorite) win as opposed to voting for A where you're helping your second favorite.
The difference is that the authoritarian nature of the GOP allows it to march on 5-6 platform planks exclusively. They publicly focus on a few policy areas, but the masses are riled up about a few social issues the rich people don’t really care about.
The Democratic Party is a big tent party that lacks that discipline because of the nature of the coalition. Black voters aren’t voting for the party of Jim Crow, but are socially conservative, for example.
Retail politics isn’t a thinking man’s game, but conservatism by its nature is always going to be more craven, irrespective of party.
The difference is that the authoritarian nature of the Democrats allows it to march on 5-6 platform planks exclusively. They publicly focus on a few policy areas, but the masses are riled up about a few social issues the rich people don’t really care about.
The Republican Party is a big tent party that lacks that discipline because of the nature of the coalition. California republicans aren’t voting for the party of religion, but are socially conservative, for example.
Retail politics isn’t a thinking man’s game, but liberalism by its nature is always going to be the more craven, irrespective of party.
> see what I did there? not trying to be preachy, but if you have the illusion that your party is superior be assured people from the other party feel the same way and both sides have fallen prey to tribalism.
What you did here, while cute, for the most part is not at all based in reality or fact.
- The GOP is NOT and has never been big tent; there is nothing to debate here.
- The GOP generally does not lack in discipline; if anything, their politicians and most of their constituents immediately fall in line behind current dogma.
Let's stop with the false balance, please; it really has no place here.
My uncle was a county GOP leader in the 90s. It was really simple messaging.
The voters that mattered were conservative democrats. You could swing union guys and Catholics. Even immigrants who are very socially conservative, and it’s easy to shock them with big city moral depravity.
My wife’s family were on the other side. They had a harder job as they had to keep various people who don’t like each other cooperating without a call to arms.
Politics no matter who you are is a messy business. That’s why I got as far away from it as I could!
The cure for bullshit is not to read approved propaganda before reading the questionable text.
The cure for bullshit is the Scientific Method. Find "facts" from that source that you can verify locally, and check them yourself. Asking someone is never verifying something. Only checking for yourself if verifying.
People can't do the hypothetical scientific method that everyone learned in school for every study, because it costs a huge amount of time and money. Most individuals can't follow 10k people for 20 years and see whether obesity goes away when doctors recommend high intensity interval training vs the normal standard of care.
Worse, if you take facts from your life you'll inevitable draw a smaller and more biased sample size. Maybe the people you know are already doing HIIT. Maybe you know knowledgeable/ignorant people who are more/less aware of exercise. Maybe by random chance you know three people who actually listened to their doctor, and nobody who didn't listen will admit it.
It's probably better to do the Actual Scientific Method and search Google Scholar to see if anyone made a funnel plot to check for publication bias, if the meta-analyses look okay, if there are replications by other people, if there's an ongoing war between two groups of scientists who both have good points and superficially-similar studies in opposite directions, and basically just trusting that if there are ten studies from different institutions they can't all be committing academic fraud.
I've known people who practise what you describe. Some have come to the conclusion that viruses don't exist and that the earth is flat. When presented with "facts" they cannot verify they're more likely to pick those requiring excruciating feats of mental gymnastics over those that are simple, boring but ultimately more plausible.
The problem is that educating people to do critical thinking doesn't scale. This should be taught in elementary school when children are learning to learn, but adults are mostly a lost cause. Psyops and information warfare work to a frightening degree, and today the internet is the primary weapon of delivery. It takes decades to destabilize a nation, but it also takes decades to bring it back on track. The latter to my knowledge has never been done. The affected nation is in a state of confusion and desbelief about its actual situation, and it takes time to even realize they're under attack. We've already seen the effects of this: unfit political leaders elected, breakdown of democratic processes, rejection of nationalism, increase in internal sociopolitical conflict and belief in conspiracy theories, etc. Modern warfare is waged online, not on the battlefield.
The whole idea of "information warfare" is based on the assumption that people are rational and have a vested interest in learning the truth. What if they don't? Nazism doesn't only work because of misinformation, it works because people are happy and content with accepting easy answers to complex problems.
This has such far reaching consequences that people leave school with a feeling of contentedness, believing because they attended an institution that claims to teach critical thinking, they're now able to categorize information with total clarity, forever, without any major effort.
The reality is, you cannot "educate" people to do critical thinking. You can expose them to knowledge and challenge them to verify whether said knowledge is true, but in the end you can only hope that they start questioning their own beliefs. I don't want to sound pretentious, because I know that I follow the same fallacy, but realistically: How many people question the information they absorb from their environment? And with an outlook into the future, how many people will have the facilities to do so in an effective way?
It's a stupid example, but ask people around you on what factual basis they believe the planet Mars exist. If they do, ask them how they can verify their knowledge and whether they have ever seen it with their own eyes. Mars is visible to the naked Eye in both hemispheres, which is why I find it so fascinating to ask: It's easy to verify by just looking up at night. If they can't give you a plan on how to verify it after a while (just look up!) I like to ask how they know that Mars isn't an elaborate hoax created by the government to fool them.
I mostly agree with what you said, but critical thinking can indeed be taught in elementary education. Children can learn from an early age to question the reality presented to them, to apply analytical reasoning to arrive at their own conclusions, and perhaps most importantly in this golden age of bullshit, to be extremely critical of the information they consume online, from mainstream media sources, and even their peers. Not all children will pick up this practice equally and carry it through their adult life, but it's important that they're presented with these crucial tools that can help them be less susceptible, though not invulnerable, to information warfare. Unfortunately, education is mostly based around memorizing and regurgitating facts, rather than teaching people critical thinking skills.
To be clear, we're all vulnerable to IW in varying degrees. Thinking critically at the very least makes people more skeptical of the information they consume, and lowers the chance they would spread it further and "infect" others.
There's no easy protection against IW or a quick cure from the effects of it. It takes at least a couple of decades to educate a new generation of people to slow down the bleeding, and for the oldest "infected" generation to die out. But first the nation's government must realize that they are indeed a victim of IW, which is difficult to do because there's no direct link that points to it since it's an operation that spans decades, and because of the confused state it inflicts in its victims. Judging by the actions of most Western countries, they haven't even accepted this as a possibility yet.
This is an interesting interview[1] where all this was outlined 40 years ago. So this is certainly well known to all intelligence agencies.
"Slowly, his eyes adjust to the light of the sun. First he can see only shadows. Gradually he can see the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves. Eventually, he is able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally he can look upon the sun itself (516a)."[2] Only after he can look straight at the sun "is he able to reason about it"
The fallacy here though is believing that there exists a teacher that can drag you out of the cave. I'm not some nutjob that believes in the government trying to indoctrinate our children, but my teachers happily repeated the whole bit about the personal carbon footprint to us, when years later it was revealed that it was a huge (and by reasonable thinking somewhat obvious) false flag campaign led by Exxon.
>The reality is, you cannot "educate" people to do critical thinking.
Critical thinking seems to me like a immune response, if stimulated with study and pratice (outside world knowledge), and -sane- social interactions.. get strong, and there are the danger of an over-response too, too critic can lead to -no-critic-.
And -probably- people is not rational, but has rationality aside others thing. When rationality is not needed, it weaken, and BS are not eliminated and accumulate.
Critical thinking? GMAB. People would have to be taught how to critique research. Common critical thinking doesn't cut it, and in the example of politicized science substitutes for the craven "believe me or you aren't a critical thinker".
Science's public credibility has always fully depended on its publicly perceived integrity, not the public's "critical thinking".
Science / academia undermined its foundation decades ago and the current whining about it being challenged by soccer dads amounts to wanting to avoid acknowledging the sociopolitical consequences of science's self-debasement. It amounts to wanting to both own and eat cake. It's a child's whine.
The reality is that official representatives of science cannot successfully browbeat people into giving it and them credibility, especially not in one of the most politicized environments that this Nation has known. That credibility had to be earned and maintained, and it wasn't. And so now the situation is that people will instinctually look for perceived inconsistencies (lies) as their technique in order to try to survive science and its representatives.
Science created this situation. Its doubters did not.
We see that the irony isn't lost on you to claim "psyops", being "under attack". and disparaging "conspiracies" in the same paragraph. We might assume that this roughly correlates with positions that you do and do not agree with.
I don't understand what you're arguing for. Science is responsible for information warfare? Huh?
> We might assume that this roughly correlates with positions that you do and do not agree with.
I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with anything in that paragraph. I'm just pointing out that the bullshit TFA refers to are signs of information warfare, and that the sociopolitical climate we've seen in Western countries in recent years is a clear effect of it. I'm also saying that nudging people to think critically can help a small percentage of people, as the referenced study shows, but that this isn't a cure for the high efficacy of IW.
It would help a lot even if the focus was on one particular aspect of critical thinking: being able to tell the difference between a statement of opinion and a statement of fact.
People believing bullshit are easier to lure with advertising into buying something they don't need, or vote the wrong person in power. Yes, there is a cure, but the cynical me doesn't see a therapy anytime soon: bullshit brings power.
My bullshit is not bullshit and we need to stop anyone from challenging it because not bullshit shouldn't have to defend itself. Which we largely but imperfectly prevent, currently.
Prediction markets could help.[0] If you create a financial incentive to evaluate probabilities more accurately (conversely, expensive to manipulate), and force market participants to come to an agreement, then people who are seemingly confident could "put their money where their mouth is" quite literally, or admit that they were bullshitting in the first place.
There's also the opportunity to use prediction markets to hold policymakers accountable.[1] Claiming you can reduce emissions by X year is easy, but what's harder is convincing a prediction market to agree with the statement "If X is implemented, will X policy lower emissions by 10% by the year Y?"
The neuroscience-based literal cures for bullshit are the following:
1) temporal reduction of serotoninergic transmission in the right hemisphere of the human brain;
2) caloric vestibular stimulation (of the left ear);
all of which are supposed to induce some critical thought. Caloric vestibular stimulation is basically pouring cold water into the left ear, which is supposed to induce a specific pattern of activity in the right hemisphere, which have been shown to reverse pattern non-recognition.
Why can't psychiatrists prescribe those treatments for politicians etc? Because psychiatry itself is a bullshit medicine.
hard to say if there is a -cure- (apart study, culture, empaty..) but maybe finding what fuel BS can reveal how to reduce the trouble.. just an idea:
In a small human group (in the last, say 50k years, but probably a lot more), there are no space for BS, apart jokes, or seriously consequences on survival will occur.
Today billion of humas live in a global group, words/information/data come fast and in quantity unmanageable. Reason has to work hard, and BS in the flux come and has spaces to stay, and consequences are delayed and indirect, damped by so many complexity/levels in the social structures (to simplify a lot).
At the beginning of newspapers era, come also some BS (propaganda), but action was manageable, it was not too fast, too much/per-day, we have time to rethink about the news of the past day, bu neverthles bring nations in wars and begin revolutions..
Now simply is an overload, we can't manage it. It's like a virus (pardon L.Anderson), and any cure is totally on the peculiarity of the intellectual-immune-system of the single, but for the humankind exposed is a caos, litterally, like pollution, is simple too much.
36 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 90.9 ms ] threadthe actual people who lack analytical thinking are the people who aren't aware of this.
If we all agree that one party states are bad, why are two party states not almost as bad? (when compared with N party states, for N>>2)
(in particular, an N party state gives more incentive for each of the parties to be for something, rather than degenerating to "against the other")
The rise in alternative voting methods I think is because people really want a third-party to do well but if we have A,B,C and you prefer C > A > B but A,B are most likely to win in a first-past-the-post scenario then by voting for C you're indirectly helping B (you're least favorite) win as opposed to voting for A where you're helping your second favorite.
The Democratic Party is a big tent party that lacks that discipline because of the nature of the coalition. Black voters aren’t voting for the party of Jim Crow, but are socially conservative, for example.
Retail politics isn’t a thinking man’s game, but conservatism by its nature is always going to be more craven, irrespective of party.
The Republican Party is a big tent party that lacks that discipline because of the nature of the coalition. California republicans aren’t voting for the party of religion, but are socially conservative, for example.
Retail politics isn’t a thinking man’s game, but liberalism by its nature is always going to be the more craven, irrespective of party.
> see what I did there? not trying to be preachy, but if you have the illusion that your party is superior be assured people from the other party feel the same way and both sides have fallen prey to tribalism.
- The GOP is NOT and has never been big tent; there is nothing to debate here.
- The GOP generally does not lack in discipline; if anything, their politicians and most of their constituents immediately fall in line behind current dogma.
Let's stop with the false balance, please; it really has no place here.
that shows your limited knowledge. California Republicans are very different than Mississippi Republicans.
> GOP generally does not lack in discipline
Are you implying Democrats don't immediately fall in line behind the current issue du jour and vote for who they're told to vote for?
Balance, critical thinking and empathy are important, tribalism and demonization really has no place here.
The voters that mattered were conservative democrats. You could swing union guys and Catholics. Even immigrants who are very socially conservative, and it’s easy to shock them with big city moral depravity.
My wife’s family were on the other side. They had a harder job as they had to keep various people who don’t like each other cooperating without a call to arms.
Politics no matter who you are is a messy business. That’s why I got as far away from it as I could!
The cure for bullshit is the Scientific Method. Find "facts" from that source that you can verify locally, and check them yourself. Asking someone is never verifying something. Only checking for yourself if verifying.
Worse, if you take facts from your life you'll inevitable draw a smaller and more biased sample size. Maybe the people you know are already doing HIIT. Maybe you know knowledgeable/ignorant people who are more/less aware of exercise. Maybe by random chance you know three people who actually listened to their doctor, and nobody who didn't listen will admit it.
It's probably better to do the Actual Scientific Method and search Google Scholar to see if anyone made a funnel plot to check for publication bias, if the meta-analyses look okay, if there are replications by other people, if there's an ongoing war between two groups of scientists who both have good points and superficially-similar studies in opposite directions, and basically just trusting that if there are ten studies from different institutions they can't all be committing academic fraud.
No. No. No. This is confirmation bias.
Also note that since 2012, it is now legal for US IC to use propaganda on US citizens https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mhastings/congressmen-s...
The reality is, you cannot "educate" people to do critical thinking. You can expose them to knowledge and challenge them to verify whether said knowledge is true, but in the end you can only hope that they start questioning their own beliefs. I don't want to sound pretentious, because I know that I follow the same fallacy, but realistically: How many people question the information they absorb from their environment? And with an outlook into the future, how many people will have the facilities to do so in an effective way?
It's a stupid example, but ask people around you on what factual basis they believe the planet Mars exist. If they do, ask them how they can verify their knowledge and whether they have ever seen it with their own eyes. Mars is visible to the naked Eye in both hemispheres, which is why I find it so fascinating to ask: It's easy to verify by just looking up at night. If they can't give you a plan on how to verify it after a while (just look up!) I like to ask how they know that Mars isn't an elaborate hoax created by the government to fool them.
To be clear, we're all vulnerable to IW in varying degrees. Thinking critically at the very least makes people more skeptical of the information they consume, and lowers the chance they would spread it further and "infect" others.
There's no easy protection against IW or a quick cure from the effects of it. It takes at least a couple of decades to educate a new generation of people to slow down the bleeding, and for the oldest "infected" generation to die out. But first the nation's government must realize that they are indeed a victim of IW, which is difficult to do because there's no direct link that points to it since it's an operation that spans decades, and because of the confused state it inflicts in its victims. Judging by the actions of most Western countries, they haven't even accepted this as a possibility yet.
This is an interesting interview[1] where all this was outlined 40 years ago. So this is certainly well known to all intelligence agencies.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOmXiapfCs8
Why would you think that? It is a learned skill, of course you can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
"Slowly, his eyes adjust to the light of the sun. First he can see only shadows. Gradually he can see the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves. Eventually, he is able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally he can look upon the sun itself (516a)."[2] Only after he can look straight at the sun "is he able to reason about it"
The fallacy here though is believing that there exists a teacher that can drag you out of the cave. I'm not some nutjob that believes in the government trying to indoctrinate our children, but my teachers happily repeated the whole bit about the personal carbon footprint to us, when years later it was revealed that it was a huge (and by reasonable thinking somewhat obvious) false flag campaign led by Exxon.
You need to apply some critical thinking to your position on this topic ;)
Critical thinking seems to me like a immune response, if stimulated with study and pratice (outside world knowledge), and -sane- social interactions.. get strong, and there are the danger of an over-response too, too critic can lead to -no-critic-. And -probably- people is not rational, but has rationality aside others thing. When rationality is not needed, it weaken, and BS are not eliminated and accumulate.
Science's public credibility has always fully depended on its publicly perceived integrity, not the public's "critical thinking".
Science / academia undermined its foundation decades ago and the current whining about it being challenged by soccer dads amounts to wanting to avoid acknowledging the sociopolitical consequences of science's self-debasement. It amounts to wanting to both own and eat cake. It's a child's whine.
The reality is that official representatives of science cannot successfully browbeat people into giving it and them credibility, especially not in one of the most politicized environments that this Nation has known. That credibility had to be earned and maintained, and it wasn't. And so now the situation is that people will instinctually look for perceived inconsistencies (lies) as their technique in order to try to survive science and its representatives.
Science created this situation. Its doubters did not.
We see that the irony isn't lost on you to claim "psyops", being "under attack". and disparaging "conspiracies" in the same paragraph. We might assume that this roughly correlates with positions that you do and do not agree with.
> We might assume that this roughly correlates with positions that you do and do not agree with.
I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with anything in that paragraph. I'm just pointing out that the bullshit TFA refers to are signs of information warfare, and that the sociopolitical climate we've seen in Western countries in recent years is a clear effect of it. I'm also saying that nudging people to think critically can help a small percentage of people, as the referenced study shows, but that this isn't a cure for the high efficacy of IW.
(This comment is a statement of opinion.)
There's also the opportunity to use prediction markets to hold policymakers accountable.[1] Claiming you can reduce emissions by X year is easy, but what's harder is convincing a prediction market to agree with the statement "If X is implemented, will X policy lower emissions by 10% by the year Y?"
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prediction-market-faq
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/instead-of-pledging-to...
1) temporal reduction of serotoninergic transmission in the right hemisphere of the human brain; 2) caloric vestibular stimulation (of the left ear);
all of which are supposed to induce some critical thought. Caloric vestibular stimulation is basically pouring cold water into the left ear, which is supposed to induce a specific pattern of activity in the right hemisphere, which have been shown to reverse pattern non-recognition.
Why can't psychiatrists prescribe those treatments for politicians etc? Because psychiatry itself is a bullshit medicine.
In a small human group (in the last, say 50k years, but probably a lot more), there are no space for BS, apart jokes, or seriously consequences on survival will occur.
Today billion of humas live in a global group, words/information/data come fast and in quantity unmanageable. Reason has to work hard, and BS in the flux come and has spaces to stay, and consequences are delayed and indirect, damped by so many complexity/levels in the social structures (to simplify a lot).
At the beginning of newspapers era, come also some BS (propaganda), but action was manageable, it was not too fast, too much/per-day, we have time to rethink about the news of the past day, bu neverthles bring nations in wars and begin revolutions..
Now simply is an overload, we can't manage it. It's like a virus (pardon L.Anderson), and any cure is totally on the peculiarity of the intellectual-immune-system of the single, but for the humankind exposed is a caos, litterally, like pollution, is simple too much.