Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
https://extragoodshit.phlap.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Why-the-Past-10-Years-of-American-Life-Have-Been-Uniquely-Stupid.htmlMay reason rule.
= new reply since forum marked as read
a continual arms race for attention.
JMHO.
Well said, that's a succinct summary of a TLDR!
While I do not concur with each and every of the author's conclusions, the opinion piece is based within the realm of investigative doubt, which is the very basis of reason.
... and started talking to one another? It's cellphones that are being used to infect our brains with propaganda.
...the opinion piece is based within the realm of investigative doubt, which is the very basis of reason.
There is no reason in the absence of doubt.
Doubt is the seed of reason.
Curiosity is a form of doubt, it seeks to reveal what there may be, that has not been understood.
It is the very foundation of our intellectual reasoning.
Extragoodshit is a website that I came across when I was researching an alternate reader link from the article that was posted on https://www.memeorandum.com/river ... it's not an endorsement of the site itself, merely a reader link.
More than anything I like to promote well reasoned intellectual discourse that may lay bare insights from others that hold the promise of understanding how the rubber really meets the road.
Thank you for your analysis, it provides further insights for all that may read it in laying bare how the rubber, really meets the road!
Re doubt, some say it's a seed of skepticism. I see it as a seed of insecurity and, when not tested, can lead to despair.
https://patch.com/us/across-america/there-good-bad-kind-doubt
Curiosity is a form of wonder, something to be cultivated and encouraged.
Thanks a bunch for your post!
Last edited Thu Mar 9, 2023, 10:31 AM - Edit history (1)
Thank you for the meaningful, well thought out and and informed responses.
TIL about Terry Heick, I will read into his work further, as I find his examination of curiosity most fascinating! So cool!
I learned at an early age that definition of terms define how one approaches a subject.
Differentiation of terms and the inferences one draws from them are akin to our life experiences, where many experience the same thing simultaneously, with each coming away with their own unique experience.
I was reared as a "true believer" within a sect of the Abrahamic Blood Cults. I was inculcated from birth, and was taught to reject all doubt, instead embracing the delusion of faith, which as presented within the fable, requires one to cast aside all doubt, and merely "believe".
Within the fable, Thomas was decried for his lack of "faith" because he doubted.
Today, I view the fabled Thomas as a heroic figure. He was the only character that even attempted to embrace reason.
It took me thirty years to escape the tenacious grip of the Abrahamic delusions that I had been inculcated with since birth.
So for me, doubt is a many splendid thing.
When I rejected doubt, I was "beat to hell" by the delusions that I embraced as a result of that rejection.
When I embraced doubt, I was "lifted out" by the doubt that I had necessarily employed to gain reason.
Hence, "Beat to hell, lifted out, odd to say, both times by doubt!"
Doubt is my "savior".
Reason is my "god".
My best take on the Abrahamic tales is: "If your father's forgiveness needs blood for the plan, wash in the son of your god's, not the suffering mans!!"
Peace y'all, and may reason rule!
I posted the article 11 months ago:
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid: It's not just a phase.
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216587213
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/
https://archive.ph/exMna
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It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families. Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?
The Rise of the Modern Tower
There is a direction to history and it is toward cooperation at larger scales. We see this trend in biological evolution, in the series of “major transitions” through which multicellular organisms first appeared and then developed new symbiotic relationships. We see it in cultural evolution too, as Robert Wright explained in his 1999 book, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Wright showed that history involves a series of transitions, driven by rising population density plus new technologies (writing, roads, the printing press) that created new possibilities for mutually beneficial trade and learning. Zero-sum conflicts—such as the wars of religion that arose as the printing press spread heretical ideas across Europe—were better thought of as temporary setbacks, and sometimes even integral to progress. (Those wars of religion, he argued, made possible the transition to modern nation-states with better-informed citizens.) President Bill Clinton praised Nonzero’s optimistic portrayal of a more cooperative future thanks to continued technological advance.
The early internet of the 1990s, with its chat rooms, message boards, and email, exemplified the Nonzero thesis, as did the first wave of social-media platforms, which launched around 2003. Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook made it easy to connect with friends and strangers to talk about common interests, for free, and at a scale never before imaginable. By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the dominant platform, with more than 100 million monthly users, on its way to roughly 3 billion today. In the first decade of the new century, social media was widely believed to be a boon to democracy. What dictator could impose his will on an interconnected citizenry? What regime could build a wall to keep out the internet?
The high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the global Occupy movement. That is also when Google Translate became available on virtually all smartphones, so you could say that 2011 was the year that humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel. We were closer than we had ever been to being “one people,” and we had effectively overcome the curse of division by language. For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.
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in a 2018 interview, Steve Bannon, the former adviser to Donald Trump, said that the way to deal with the media is “to flood the zone with shit.” He was describing the “firehose of falsehood” tactic pioneered by Russian disinformation programs to keep Americans confused, disoriented, and angry. But back then, in 2018, there was an upper limit to the amount of shit available, because all of it had to be created by a person (other than some low-quality stuff produced by bots).
Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it will become far more capable. In a 2020 essay titled “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)
American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. In a haunting 2018 essay titled “The Digital Maginot Line,” DiResta described the state of affairs bluntly. “We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality,” she wrote. The Soviets used to have to send over agents or cultivate Americans willing to do their bidding. But social media made it cheap and easy for Russia’s Internet Research Agency to invent fake events or distort real ones to stoke rage on both the left and the right, often over race. Later research showed that an intensive campaign began on Twitter in 2013 but soon spread to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other platforms. One of the major goals was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at the exact weak point that Madison had identified.
We now know that it’s not just the Russians attacking American democracy. Before the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, China had mostly focused on domestic platforms such as WeChat. But now China is discovering how much it can do with Twitter and Facebook, for so little money, in its escalating conflict with the U.S. Given China’s own advances in AI, we can expect it to become more skillful over the next few years at further dividing America and further uniting China. In the 20th century, America’s shared identity as the country leading the fight to make the world safe for democracy was a strong force that helped keep the culture and the polity together. In the 21st century, America’s tech companies have rewired the world and created products that now appear to be corrosive to democracy, obstacles to shared understanding, and destroyers of the modern tower.
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