“When gathering information, what questions do we ask? How hard do we work to get to the truth? Do we consider alternative perspectives and explanations? Scrutinize the quality of our sources? Attend to the limits of our evidence?”
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 way because the very rich seem to believe they aren't stakeholders in society or planet Earth, and that they can breathe and eat money, and so they are extracting as much of it as possible before it all comes crashing down rather than doing anything to reset, rebuild, or prevent it.
Beware times when private edifices rival, or subsume, the states' majesty.
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 their government should do something about it.
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.
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.
> As humans, we care about forming true beliefs and avoiding false beliefs. We want to know, understand, get things right. We want to avoid cognitive error and ignorance. These are our twin epistemic aims.
Unfortunately, I think there's much evidence that most people would verbally agree with this but their subsequent actions would reveal that they choose to seek out, and believe as true, information that confirms rather than challenges their already established beliefs.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadBeware times when private edifices rival, or subsume, the states' majesty.
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.
Things you personally see = 10
Things you heard from a friend = 9
Things you heard from a stranger on the internet = 1
Things you heard from a professional talker on the internet = -10
Right now, truth is based mostly on those last 2.
https://privatebin.net/?4c31faa3cd73a20c#3fu148gYZqMAwHCY2xx...
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...
Unfortunately, I think there's much evidence that most people would verbally agree with this but their subsequent actions would reveal that they choose to seek out, and believe as true, information that confirms rather than challenges their already established beliefs.
In other words: the Righteous Mind by Haidt.