The author writes, “You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right”. Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue (e.g. pro-Ukraine to anti-Ukraine or vice versa) and still keep their following and ability to monetize it.
Social media is full of parasocial relationships; followers are in love with an influencer’s personality, not their views or factual content. So, the influencer can completely change his mind about stuff, as long as he still has the engaging presentation that people have come to like. Followers are also often in love with the brand relationships that the influencers flog, because people love being told what stuff they should buy.
It's more about being confident and extreme on their stance no matter what it is at that particular moment. People are attracted to personalities that are confident and says they are right all the time. Heck, personalities like that gets all the influence in the workplace too. Imagine John Doe in your office who has a solution for every problem and knows the code base like the back of their hand. You might find that they are not so right all the time (maybe 2 out of 3 times it's pure conjecture) but gosh you will go back to him for solutions the next time you run into a problem.
What I am saying is that we are attracted to the extreme, the flamboyant, the controversial. Maybe it's time we prioritize critical thinking for the future generation no?
I see it as the continued corporatisation of everything. I suspect that you'd be hard press to find anyone who has ever been anywhere above middle-management in a corporate organisation who doesnt see, and chuckles at, the similarities in the worst places they've worked and this:
"Where admitting uncertainty is social suicide. Where every conversation is a performance for your tribe rather than an actual exchange of ideas. You lose the ability to solve problems that don't fit neatly into your ideological framework, which turns out to be most important problems"
Politics is the obvious one to see this effect in action but it's bled into so many facet of society now because society is one giant grey areas but our mediums don't like greys. The medium continues to be the message.
That's not corporatisation, it's basic human tribalism. If anything one of the the best things about corporations is that they can sometimes escape that kind of culture.
I have been a small content creator for 10 years now. I've been hampered a lot by actively discouraging these types of parasocial relationships - every now and then I'll get a gaggle of followers that spend entirely too much time on my crappy content or my personality/posts and I get extremely weirded out to the point I want to stop doing it entirely. Everyone tells me I'm doing it wrong, but I swear, 10 years ago it wasn't as much of a thing to create a cult around yourself on social media or streaming platforms. Now it's the primary monetization path.
I've even gone so far to say to more than one person, "look, I like and appreciate you really like my content or my personality, but, you don't know me at all, I don't know you, and honestly, we're not friends, no matter how much you want that to be the case. That isn't to say I dislike you, but you need to be more realistic about the content you consume, and if this hurts your feelings a lot, I'm sorry, but this content probably isn't for you."
Then there's the type of content creator that gets a following by being a huge jerk to their fans - I don't like that either. I just tell them to treat it like a TV show. It's not real, the character in the show doesn't know you or like you. Unfortunately for today's youth and media landscape this is an utterly foreign concept.
There are / were a couple of right-wing shillers that were literally paid to promote Russian talking points and they just fit it right into their schtick without blinking.
Nothing on the internet is real. If it wants money or opinion or attention, consider it hostile and try to find the strings (although it's generally not worth the time to try and find the strings, just move on and do something productive instead).
People are also more isolated than ever, positioning them poorly for having robust real relationships. This makes them vulnerable to mistaking "influencers" as their friends.
the words we use matter a lot. the "pro" and "anti" anything is a pretty large reason why all discourse has become so stupid sounding and talking with people about any issue is enraging. nuance is dead. the cultural zeitgeist is being controlled by algorithmic feeds that create neuroticism (i am definitely affected), general anxiety, and anger.
My take on this is that persons are great, everyone should know a few. Groups of people on the other hand are, and always have been, genuinely pretty awful in almost every way. IMHO this is down to some really basic primate stuff that's just inevitable. Social media is a big problem because it makes it easier to create groups, and algorithms are a big problem because they essentially take all of the dynamics that would inevitably lead to conflict anyway, and accelerate them.
Groups, algorithms, and conflict itself are all things that lead to wicked problems. Each one tends to spiral, where the only solution is more of the same, and if you escape one funnel then you fall into an adjacent one. Problem: Some group is against me. Solution: Create a group to bolster my strength. Problem: People are fighting. Solution: Join the fight so the fight will stop sooner. Problem: My code is too complicated to understand. Solution: More code to add logging and telemetry. Problem: Attempting to add telemetry has broken the code. Solution: Time to start a fight
> 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.
Indeed, and an articulate, confident defense can also be that much more insidious. I never found it hard to ignore obviously bad-faith talking heads on cable news, but when someone is on a podcast conversation with a host I like, it's much easier to nod along until that moment where they say something demonstrably false and I have to rewind my brain a minute or two to be like... wait a sec, what? How did you get to that position?
They were called Sophists in Ancient Greece and were despised by Socrates because their arguments were based, not on truth or facts, but whatever rhetoric would convince the audience.
The quality I value in myself (and others when I find it) is a bias to doubt evidence of things I already believe, and to accept proof of things I do not believe. The bias isn't strong (that way lies madness!), but it makes your mental model of the world stronger. It's also a much better filter than "intelligent", "polite" or "articulate", which are all orthogonal to the kind of rational, open skepticism I advocate. The big downside is that such qualities are subtle and hard to judge. Tribal affiliation is, for all its faults, easy to measure.
Another point of optimism: being a persecuted (or neglected) minority can have some positive effects, if you can find your people.
And in a classic stroke of Gell-Mann amnesia, if you're questioning what you just heard, how much should you trust what you were hearing five minutes ago?
Yes, it's easy to cherry-pick an obviously absurd position that could be articulately argued. But the point is that you are definitely wrong about some things and should generally keep an open mind. Even intelligent people are wrong about certain things, and in fact their propensity for rationalization can lead them into some absurd positions. But some of those positions turn out to be right, like the Earth orbiting the Sun, for example.
The grandparent's point is that articulate prose is irrelevant to the strength/correctness of the argument or intelligence of the author.
I would take it a step further and include that it has no bearing on the morality of the author.
The original claim was:
> 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.
In truth, it does no such thing. Articulate arguments serve neither as proof the person making it isn't a monster nor that they are particularly intelligent or knowledgeable about that which they argue.
Though, I would also point out that monsters can occasionally be right as well.
I think he's using the wrong word here. "Articulate" isn't enough. What you need to do is compare the arguments from both sides about the subject, especially how they address specific things. Who is using facts, who is using emotions? How do claims stand up to time?
That's true, but if you want one, you can find one. If you've conditioned yourself to think that articulate==credible, then sometimes it only takes one.
Yes, and this is not just due to the intelligence of the "believers" but due to the fact that describing 2=2=2 in a self-consistent way only takes understanding it while describing 2=2=3 in a way that appears self-consistent requires a true rhetorical genius.
Yeah, that really stood out to me, I feel certain positions are monstrous no matter how articulately stated. Saying something really mean in a more palatable way doesn't make it (or the speaker) less mean.
This seems like a cognitive bias on the author that they are mistaken for universal truth.
Absolutely agree. Many, many abhorrent ideas and perspectives are accepted very often due to them being deliberately well thought-out and appearing more "academic" sounding to the layperson. There are entire organizations (colloquially, "think-tanks") dedicated to writing pamphlets, books, and memos filled with eloquent in-depth talking points that get distributed to their respective talking heads.
I can't blame many people today for seeing this problem as the foundation of all mainstream media, instead of taking the time to individually investigate each source of information. However it does lead to this "everything is the opposite of what we're told" hysteria the author talks about
Even with the number of articulate examples like this are far out numbered by the number of inarticulate arguments that the rule still has merit. Exceptions do not make the rule bad.
>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.
Alex Jones literally did this though starting around 2016.
This is a strong argument probably but strangely aimed here. Reading the article, it does seem like you and the author agree about everything in this regard? You are kind of just rearticulating one part of their argument as critique about them. Why?
Or where do we place the reflex here? What triggered: this author is BS, is pseudointellectual, is bad. We jump here from a small note about articulation and intelligence, to what seems like this massive opportunity to attack not only that argument, but the author, the readers, everyone. Why? Does the particular point here feel like a massive structural weakness?
What was the trigger here for you, for lack of better word? Why such a strong feeling?
There are YouTubers that have talked about their struggle to change content that they discuss in their channels. The general advice is, make a new channel for a new topic because of how fans and their attention work. One YouTuber I occasionally watch talked about how they at first got hate mail when changing their topic because people in their old topic perceived the YouTuber to be one of the only voices in that field.
My guess is Alex Jones is actually a big enough personality to be able to have a brand independent of his ideas. Not every creator has that luxury.
Not every internet comment is a disagreement with what it's replying to.
The entire "media intended for voluntary casual consumption" industry is rife with these sorts of "gotta keep doing what you're known for" traps. Pretty much every industry with minimal product differentiation is like this to varying extents. Sorry my examples weren't completely devoid of exceptions <eyeroll>.
Anyway, two can play this stupid game. Why is it such a problem that I'm alleging this content is basically scratching the same itch in the same way as tabloids but for different demographics? Why do you feel the need to make this out to be an attack on everyone rather than a narrowly targeted "the world do be the way it is" criticism?
I don't really think its a problem and didn't indicate as such. Its why I was asking questions, trying to reconcile arguments, and overall not trying to assume one way or the other. But I can see I somehow have wasted your time regardless, sorry about that!
For everything else, sorry, I really don't know what you are saying, but your kind of righteous anger at the author is something I can certainly respect even if I am not quite sure what context you are coming from here. "Media intended for voluntary casual consumption" seems to be a pretty wide net.. what are you trying distinguish with that phrase? Media whose consumption is compulsory and not casual.. Maybe like educational/job training videos I guess? Instructional manuals? Also, what is the author here known for, that they have to keep doing? Really trying to parse here, is it maybe just "being intellectual"?
Small aside, but it's easier to talk to my cat recently then to try and use any form of prose to communicate something successfully on HN. The breakdown of communication is almost surreal these days and I don't even know what to point to. Threads get like 3 levels deep and it just becomes a mess! While never perfect, this used to be such a great place for deep discussion, whats changing?
As a long time proponent of reasonable-ism I disagree with a lot of this. The assumption that a lot of our problems stem from 2 sides just seeing an issue differently is just nonsense in this day and age.
The big Problem, is that one side has slid heavily into authoritarianism, and the other side is completely ill-equipped to fight it.
On any particular issue, the right will say whatever gets them more Power, and the left will bring out some sort of philosophy professor to try and pick apart the nuances of the conversation.
For real. Honestly, the idea that all people are good and caring and just see things differently is the comforting lie.
I really really want to believe it. You get to feel happy about humanity, smarter than all the hysterical people, etc,
It took so so so much evil from the Republicans to convince me that they are Not a reasonable side, do Not warrant any consideration, and that people who follow them Are morally corrupt.
I was thinking about this while reading the article. 15 years ago I prided myself on actively searching out opposing views and engaging with them. I still do that in the small scale, talking with coworkers or friends who have opposing views, but where the fuck can you find any reasonable conservative commentators these days. What are the most prominent voices? People like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder? They don't have an intellectually honest bone in their body.
How the hell can you even get a balanced view in terms of news/media you consume when one side is dominated by lunatics and bad actors.
I'm not familiar with Ben Shapiro or Steven Crowder but what makes you so sure that their point of view is unreasonable? It seems you agree that their viewpoint is opposing, which likely means their premise are different, so isn't it entirely possible that their conclusion is reasonable and logical when one starts from their position?
Also, there isn't one source that can represent the "conservative" viewpoint because there isn't one conservative viewpoint. There are many factions within the Republican party with sometimes shockingly different points of view. Just like the Democratic party representing the "liberal" agenda.
I could just as easily ask, where is the one source I go to get an understanding of the liberal agenda? (Just a rhetorical question, I actually don't follow the news and don't plan to.)
Sure. When you start from the axiom that people unlike yourself are evil and must be harmed at all costs, you might end up near those positions. However, most people don't have that axiom, and we shouldn't attempt to compromise those who do, but should fence them (as in a distributed system fencing failed nodes).
5. If you don't care about the Bible, I strongly recommend the Tao Te Ching. Probably the most succinct, KISS philosophy and spirituality book ever written in the history of mankind.
To misquote Alan Watts, all other religions are for people that need the Tao explained with too many words.
My favourite version to start with, and even more succinct than the original, is Ron Hogan's https://terebess.hu/english/tao/ron.html then you can move on to fancier translations.
Second this comment. The Tao Te Ching is about as close to a “right answer” in metaphysics as we’re likely to get.
Even after going around the houses for 2500 years, eventually philosophy reached Wittgenstein who had to hold his hands up and say “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” which is pretty well a summary of what Lao Tzu was pointing at.
So you're suggesting an Eastern philosophy and spirituality instead of a Western one. I've listened to both Jordan Peterson and Eckhart Tolle, the difference is quite big but both points of view are interesting.
I would replace your number 5 with "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" or "MacBeth" or "Calvin & Hobbes" or maybe even Natsume's "I am a Cat." Also fun fictional books with impressive protagonists.
Other than that, your first four points are wonderful.
As an atheist, I do find some use for the Jefferson Bible. (US Founding Father) Thomas Jefferson collected all the best parts of the Gospels, dropped the miracles, some of the stranger allegories, but kept all the sermons (the things Jesus was said to have directly taught). It's about 14 "letter" pages, so almost "pamphlet" sized. As far as I'm concerned it finds most of the baby in the bathwater (IMO, so much bathwater), is an easy read, and says some things much more succinctly that I think a lot of Christians might be surprised to find are core teachings of Jesus in the Bible.
I sometimes wonder what the country would be like if every hotel desk was more likely to have a copy of the Jefferson Bible than the Gideon Bible.
Strongly agreed. Reading the actual bible is (mostly) boring as sin. There are a couple of gems in there that you can just take on their own though.
My personal favourite is Ecclesiastes which, apart from a couple of lines of slop added by a later author, has little to do with Abrahamic religion and is more just a little nugget of proto-existentialism.
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
The more the words,
the less the meaning,
and how does that profit anyone?
Ecclesiastes 6:11
---
“We, and I personally, believe very strongly that more information is better, even if it’s wrong. Let’s start from the premise that more information, more empowerment, is fundamentally the correct answer.”
Eric Schmidt
I read Ecclesiastes back in 2019. It's probably one of the more interesting books in the Bible. I wasn't particularly impressed with it, but it's a short read, so I still think it's a good suggestion, especially if you're atheist or agnostic.
There is apparently evidence that there was a Jesus¹ who preached and was crucified for causing a pain for those in power. But the version of Jesus in the bible is likely no more real than the Abraham in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012).
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[1] or someone going by another name which became Jesus over time, many names in the new testament are suspiciously unlike those likely to be found in the middle east in the first century CE.
Not at all. The bible is famously allegorical which is known by everyone who practices catholicism, but the historical evidence and written records are quite clear - there was this incredibly charismatic guy who grew a following, helped the poor and got crucified.
There are non-christian references to Jesus in roman/jewish history books written in the same century, which give pretty strong support to the idea he was an actual person and was killed for his charity 'work' that catered to the poor and sick. Obviously no real 'historical evidence' is possible beyond that.
Sorry, I studied this ~30 years ago, and am not really in the mood to dig for more details :)
When you see the multiple conflicting written records, and actually look at the historical evidence, the only thing that is clear is that people keep curating what people read so they have ‘a clear written record’ that benefited them at the time. Not that the record was ever clear or unconflicted. Sometimes it was really obvious (Council of Nicea, the Anglican ‘reformation’, other times a lot more subtle - like check out what the Dead Sea scrolls say).
This should be especially clear for anyone that has studied the history of the Catholic Church, eh?
Frankly, while I’ve read many versions of the Bible (and a version of the Koran and Hadiths), the underlying theme that has always struck me is how apparent it is that at least the self-stated followers of the book i’ve met never have?
Or if they have, blanked out very large portions of it. Typically the most outspoken ones, anyway.
The new testament is also famously contradictory (as is the old, but not so obviously nor so much so). When it was pulled together from multiple sources a shoddy editing job was done.
And the old testament is taken as allegorical when it would be inconvenient for the believers to follow exactly, but taken very literally in specific parts when people want others to live a certain way. Or just ignored completely, like the existence of other gods being specifically mentioned (though IIRC not necessarily as equals) which stands in contradiction to the monotheistic view.
It is great that Jesus works for you, but you have to separate real-Jesus versus storybook-Jesus. No doubt he lived, but written stories can be elaborated on.
For all I know, Jesus could have been the world's first great magician.
The world has seen quite a few people in it, some quite remarkable - for which stories have been written. No deity or supernatural abilities need to apply.
Don't fall into a fallacy: just because "no deity or supernatural abilities need to apply" doesn't mean that a deity or supernatural abilities haven't applied.
The only honest positions we can take are: I believe / I don't believe.
I'm happy if you find calm in your faith, but one of the biggest cause leading our insanity is the idea "both side can be the truth and it's all about what you believe" when in most cases one is much more likely than the other. This causes alternative facts and idiocracy. There are a lot of "facts" online so we can "choose" the most comfortable one, and "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge".
Strong claims require strong evidence. Some book written by many, some properly delusional or crazy folks, claiming various outlandish things not physically possible these days (staying away from word "lies" but not too far, basic physics laws worked the same 2000 years ago).
Or preaching behavior absolutely unacceptable these days (Old testament would force you to be murderer pretty quickly nowadays, and I haven't heard a single Christian rejecting all of it... they can't so just they ignore most of it like it doesn't exist). All this decades and centuries after claimed facts, that ain't a proof in any sense. You can believe it for sure, I can choose to believe in Great Spaghetti Monster and its holy teachings and its about the same.
There are no contemporary roman records from that time, earliest (with both eyes squinted and a lot of wishful thinking) is more than century afterwards. Quite an impressive record for claimed son of God, or God himself or whatever it should be.
I've been reading a bit about various sects recently, today it was Jim Jones and his escapades. With enough steps back, it all looks exactly the same, including behavior of believers. To the very last bolt. Tells you a lot about humans and how they internally try to handle tough times, but not much else.
So please, lets have a more rational discussion rather than level our grandparents may consider passable but many of us don't.
Sure, but saying that such a person "is Jesus" is a strong claim.
I mean, ignore the name itself[0], and the iconography[1], and the things that can be justified by misunderstandings[2], and that the reason he got stabbed in the belly by the Roman soldier was because dying that fast was incredibly suspicious: do you really think there's evidence for someone in that era, actually making genuinely lame people walk, actually blind people see, and actually coming back from the dead?
The account can be fictional even when the person exists. Consider how there's a lot of people today, even on Hacker News, who say that Elon Musk "single-handedly" did all the things done by the companies he owns and the people employed there, and then imagine those "single-handedly" accounts became a book, and people deified his memory a century later based on the "single-handedly" claims in that book — even though there's a real Musk behind it, the person in the book would be a fiction inspired by the truth.
[0] Which will obviously be wrong, given a few layers of mis-hearing, phonetic transcription, ambiguous reading of that transcription, and the way that even William Shakespeare wrote his own name a bunch of different ways none of which is the currently mandatory one to avoid getting dinged points for mis-spelling in an English exam
Also, the Cult of Mithras would have things to say if they were still around…
[2] Take the feeding of the 5000, and apply the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on the reporting: you could have an actual reality of lots of people bringing their food, not wanting to share, the disciples being told to share what they have, that creating social pressure from everyone else to share, and it's entirely plausible for this kind of thing to be reported as a "miracle" even today, if you look around at the parts of the world press willing to use that kind of language.
Then there's walking on water, where you get the punchline to the old joke about the Priest, the Rabi, and the Wiccan who go on an inter-faith fishing trip together…
Virgin birth: First, the joke about Joseph being a gullible cuckold who just believed the excuse Mary cooked up; second, the possibility of Mary being assaulted while she slept and genuinely not knowing it happened; thirdly, "virgin" having other meanings besides current use; fourthly, pregnancy is possible from dry humping, so technical virginity may be preserved: https://www.allohealth.com/blog/reproductive-health/pregnanc...
The USA brand of 'christianity' is very un-christian-like. In strong catholic countries like most of South America, the old testament is all but entirely rejected, and even the new one treated as mostly fables - they teach you some kind of lesson, not history.
As far as I know the scholarly consensus is that there was a "Jesus" who founded the Christian cult. The only claim being made is that such a person likely existed, not that they were the son of God or actually performed miracles. Just that he wasn't entirely made up. He wouldn't have even been the only "messiah" for whom such claims were made, and the teachings ascribed to him weren't even unique.
Here is a video from the Esoterica Youtube channel which tries to present a historical view of Jesus grounded in contemporary Judaism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vxOBbYSzk
Note that "feeds" is a confusing word choice; I immediately thought of something RSS-like which often links to long-form content.
For news, my rule is to check major headlines at most once a day (often less in practice), so I am at least vaguely aware what people are talking about. Doing it this way makes it clear how ... banal? ... most clickbait is. Something local might be useful; if they mention something national it's probably actually semi-important. Though, if you can't change anything about it, is it really?
If reading the Bible, I strongly suggest starting with Matthew 5 and continuing from there, not too fast (maybe one chapter per week, so you can stop and think about it). This gets straight to the mindset, as opposed to the handful of protrusions that make it to the pop-culture version. [I have a lot more I could say about how to read the Bible, but it's no use posting it again unless someone is interested.]
Normally I customize this a bit based on exactly where my audience is coming from, and sometimes what question was asked. For HN I guess I'll assume someone who is aware of the pop-culture version of Christianity (which honestly describes a lot of people who went to church as a kid), not an active Christian, dabbling a bit in philosophy, and capable of understanding big words.
(Technically, "The Bible" is plural meaning many books. But in English we usually treat it as a single book despite using "the book of X" for its componentse)
The Bible is not a novel, and it is a grave mistake to try to read it like one. The Bible is also not a textbook, though that's closer.
If we treat it as a philosophy book, I'd say the core theme would be "What is sin, what does that imply, and what can we do about it?", though this is often implicit, and much of the book is in the form of negative answers. I expect that if a reader doesn't ultimately "get" the mindset behind this question, the Bible will never make sense, never see it as anything more than arbitrary rules interspersed with random supernatural events. Yet, I also don't think approaching the Bible from this big-picture perspective is particularly useful - certainly, many people who read it are not into philosophy (as we now mean the word) at all.
Rather, the Bible is food. You need to eat it regularly or you'll starve, and you need to give it time to digest or you will expel it without it taking effect. Like food, you should have a variety; some parts are not meant to be taken alone, while a few favorite superfoods you could in fact survive on if you had to. Some parts are low-density and some are high-density.
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The "Sermon on the Mount" in chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew is some of the highest-density content in the Bible, and (orthogonally) is designed for immediate practical use. It's even possible to spend a whole week studying a single verse for some of it (and ~3 verses per week for the rest), though I do not recommend this for newcomers. Even if you are missing 99% of the point and have no idea what you are doing, you can still get something out of these chapters if you're taking them at a rate of one chapter per week.
A rate of one chapter per week is sustainable throughout the gospels and several other frequently-read books; for some other books, maybe 5 chapters per week is appropriate. Note however that chapter size varies quite a bit (~15 and ~50 are common) and chapters are not in the original (so if you're doing this alone, feel free to split or merge chapters even if the density is right, and consider verses from the adjacent chapters for context). For the "per week", at least in the high-density parts, I suggest reading the whole thing one day, then on later days focusing on a few verses that jumped out at you, and keep them in your thoughts as you go out for your daily life.
From Matthew 8 onward, the content density isn't as extreme but it's still pretty high, and by now you're starting to get your feet under you.
For a first read, I actually recommend finishing Matthew without ever going back to the first 4 chapters (not that you can't, I just don't have a good place for them), then reading Luke (which includes an even more extended start than Matthew has), Acts (the explicit sequel to Luke), and John (the gospel according to, not the epistles of) in that order. At one chapter per week, this will take about 2 years (note that part of the reason for this order is because some people might not think they want to commit to that). After this, start poking around well-known books or parts thereof (see below), then come back to do Mark. After this it's open season. At some point, learn to use margin references to discover new chapters to study.
As a rule, in any given year, you should spend half your time in the gospels (which is common but sloppy shorthand for "the gospel according to {Matthew,Mark,Luke,John}"; strictly speaking "gospel" refers to "this is Jesus, the accessible and reliable solution for sin"), though not necessarily going chapter-by-chapter like the first time. When you eventually start reading the more difficult or low-density-food books, I suggest alternating on a more frequent basis, like every other week. Or, quite possibly if you're still here, you might be doing two independent study lines the same week - perhaps one assigned for a group, the other chosen by you personally.
Some good books to consider reading, but only after Acts (and in my plan also John) include: Ruth, Jonah, the first half of Daniel, any of the short epistles (some specifically suggest James). There are also many scattered famous chapters in other books but I keep failing to make a list thereof. You will usually find references to these in the margin so don't be afraid to follow them (I'd suggest gradually ramping up how often you do this as you go through your second or third gospel), just don't get distracted from going through the gospels until you've finished them all at least once. Hebrews 11, however, is remembered for being a chapter that many of the margin references are made from.
Note that the Bible is in part sorted by similarity. As a result, it is often a bad idea to go from one book to the adjacent books. This is particularly notable for Kings/Chronicles (two retellings of the same events) and several of Paul's epistles (same advice written to different people), but also applies within the Psalms (and Proverbs/Ecclesiastes, but they're shorter).
Some books that can be a bit of a slog, and/or with little food content in parts, yet are somewhat reliant on sequencing: Genesis through Joshua, Ruth through Nehemiah, and the two epistles to the Corinthians (other numbered epistles are more independent). To be clear, there absolutely are even large portions therein that are both easy to read and profitable, but you should still approach them with deliberation.
Some books to avoid for a while: Judges (full of negative examples), Job (much dreary philosophy which is immediately rejected), arguably Ecclesiastes (but other people like it), Song of Songs/Solomon, all of the prophets except sometimes when excerpted (Isaiah in particular is commonly cited), arguably Romans (I personally don't find nearly as hard as Hebrews, but others disagree), Hebrews (but chapter 11 is very notable to read on its own), Revelation (so many people go insane after reading it, it's not even funny).
This is not the only way to read the Bible, and certainly there are other good ways, but I do have reasons for my particular choices especially for someone with no foundation.
All translations are biased. Some translations have their bias obvious (which is good) or aimed at a target that is no longer applicable (also good); others are subtly problematic.
Avoid, at all costs, any translation that goes nuts with paraphrasing (moderate paraphrasing is usually okay). Mostly this means The Message. Also avoid any translation that is only used by a single denomination; semi-related to this, I also suggest avoiding any "study Bible", which inevitably consists more of third-party ideas telling you want to think about the passage rather than just reading it for yourself. I have nothing, however, against mere narrow-margin cross-references and rare single-word translation notes.
Other than that, for the gospels it doesn't matter much. Outside the gospels the differences become much more apparent.
The KJV (sometimes KJB or AV) has been highly influential on the English language (and, per its preface, the translators were very aware it would be). If you can stand the "thee"s and "thou"s (which do add important pluralization meaning in some places) and archaic spellings, it remains of excellent quality in most passages - better, even, than many modern translations. Its biases mostly fail to take hold of a modern audience. However, it does measurably suffer from the lack of modern linguistic scholarship in some passages (mostly, idiom-like things in the Old Testament, especially Job/Psalms/Proverbs and the prophets). Traditional editions do lack the quotation marks and paragraph flow that modern translations tend to use (though basic paragraph marks are usually present). Note that what people actually use is usually the 1769 edition, not (as some only-ists claim, the "original" 1611 which is unreadable), though there are some minor variations (such as "graffed" vs "grafted").
If you want something that keeps the KJV's advantages but is more modern, the ASV is mostly obsolete, but the NKJV is recent and pretty common (at the cost of giving up on the pluralization disambiguations). The KJ21, though much rarer, is quite useful because it does preserve the pluralization but modernizes the rest of the wording.
The NIV is popular, but I actually find it quite problematic. I have caught it on several occasions flat-out making something up, far beyond what can be explained by being a moderate paraphrase or even preferring different manuscripts. In particular, if someone in a debate cites the NIV, they're probably wrong. I think I've only once found a verse where the NIV gave a useful reading where other translations did not.
The ESV is not bad. It has its (unavoidable) biases but they are mostly of the obvious sort despite being aimed at a modern audience. However, I have found a few places where it introduces errors and ambiguities not in the KJV, such as Luke 22:31-32 (rigor summary for this verse: KJV/KJ21/NRSV/NASB good, NKJV bad as usual, NIV good for once, ESV bad for once). It is also prone to the problem of there being different editions in the wild with non-obvious differences.
The NRSV and NASB also seem relatively widely regarded, though I'm less familiar with them despite using them as parallels. They do succeed at the Luke 22 rigor test, at least in the versions I happen to have accessible (unfortunately, like the ESV, they do have non-obvious version differences).
There are a handful of other decent translations not mentioned here. But there are also a lot of low-quality translations, as well as minor variants of existing translations.
The YLT (not the Mormon "Young") is obscure but useful if you don't know enough Greek/Hebrew to efficiently use an interlinear directly, because it goes all in on literal translation, even for verb tenses that are unconventional in English.
> Read the Bible. Even if you do not believe, Jesus is the most impressive human I've ever learned about.
You might also find it edifying to learn about Socrates. His trial and punishment are as compelling as Jesus' and I his existence is more likely to be an historic fact.
Yes, they are similar and in both cases what we know about them was passed down by their unreliable students with an agenda. I have studied both over the past few years and I find myself disagreeing with Plato's Socrates often whereas I find the Jesus of the Gospels much harder to argue against.
I think that Plato's dialogs are well worth reading too.
Also, just so you know, Jesus is as or more historically "likely to be real" than Socrates (three major works written by two people who knew Him, multitudes more written by those who knew those who knew Him, mentions by multiple historians of the period, a thriving cult in spite of vicious persecutions, etc.). Socrates has three contemporaries (Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes) and then the writings of Plato project him beyond his time and into the philosophical context.
But perhaps you mean "the Jesus of the Gospels" as opposed to "Yeshua ben Yoseph min Natzret" when you said "historic" here (there's good arguments for Jesus-of-the-Gospels being Yeshua ben Yoseph too, but one thing at a time).
> 5. Read the Bible. Even if you do not believe, Jesus is the most impressive human I've ever learned about. When I started reading it I was agnostic.
Yeah, read the whole Bible — the one people swear on in court, the one the preachers hold and up and tell you it is the word of god — and don't cherry-pick. So much misogeny and shit behavior. How about this one:
“David and his men went out and killed two hundred Philistines. He brought their foreskins and presented them as payment in full to become the king's son-in-law. Then Saul gave his daughter Michal to David in marriage.”
Yeah, let's kill those Philistines! Yeah, two hundred human beings! And let's cut off their foreskins because that's not remotely sick and dysfunctional at all and make a gift of them. Seems to be behavior that was rewarded.
I like the Bible too. It is unfortunate but not unexpected that it set off such a firestorm in the replies.
I would even go so far to say that even nonbelievers would find much value in it, just reading at least the top stories and passages the Old and New Testaments. These are foundational cultural texts that bridge centuries of peoples. And if you are a nonbeliever who wants to read beyond the popular well known parts, please do! But read with a mind to connect with others, not divide.
There are other good things to read too. Plato, Shakespeare, the Chinese Classics, Greek Mythology, folktales. Things that people share with those around them as well as their ancestors
I've never seen so many Christmas lights go up this early in my little neck of the wood
They started doing heavy Black Friday sales ads almost immediately after Halloween this year, more so than I remember from even covid (but that's just my memory)
The Christmas radio station started a full 3 weeks early this year. Typically it's after 6pm on Thanksgiving day that they start.
Overall, people are worried right now. Religion slots right in there too.
The Bible is meant to conflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, as the saying goes.
I saw a Halloween display at a Walgreens in late July. I saw artificial Christmas trees for sale at Home Depot in September. I don't know what's happening but selling goods related to a holiday 3 months early seems excessive. What's next? Back to school displays before school is even let out for summer? Easter displays just after New Year's? Valentine's Day cards for sale in mid-November?
Algorithms that are profit-motivated (trying hard to get you hooked) also reward "engaging" content which means clickbait, ragebait and content that often triggers some emotions and is easy to consume. So not the most balanced content.
They're definitely talking about the news. The daily news isn't good for your mental health. Many alarmist stories and polarising ones on regular news sites and tv news.
Let me insert one more: you have to spend some time with your own thoughts.
Whatever you read, whatever you listen to, if you do not actually stop to consider it, by taking a long walk without headphones or scribbling in a notebook perhaps, you can’t know what you think.
And I suspect this is what’s happening to a lot of people. It’s easy to perform a psychological DDOS on yourself with doomscrolling or YouTube or podcasts or cable news in a way that’s actually really hard to do with a 500 page book.
The Jefferson Bible [1] is excellent in this regard. He removes all miracles and most mentions if the supernatural in a cut & paste job of a King James version of the Bible. The result is portraying Jesus as a person, not divine.
Thomas Jefferson knew Greek and Latin (was a "polymath" of the old Enlightenment era sort) and used somewhat more original sources than King James, translating them himself into English. He probably did cross-check the King James Edition for some of the English wording, or at least couldn't entirely escape its orbit/gravitational pull, but it is mostly true the Jefferson Bible was a fresh early-American translation.
Going well until (5) .. beyond the basic textual questions (old or new Testament? Which translation? Apocrypha or not?), you then have to confront the relationship of the actually existing churches to the text.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent
There is nothing stupid about this and it is a massive problem with Western news. Different anchors across different networks presenting news with the same words as if they were handed off the exact same script to read out, to emphasize the same talking points, etc. They make AI slop look so good. I fully stopped watching US News a few years ago.
Great advice there, and I must especially echo bullet 5 here, read the Bible. One point of disagreement though: I don't believe Jesus left us the option of believeing he was just a good moral teacher. (Liar, Lunatic, Lord)
When I go to the polling place to cast my vote for the candidate of my choice; I am often holding my nose and voting for the one who I think will do the least damage. I often wonder why sane, rational problem solvers are not on the ballot.
Then I realize that our system often rewards the attention seekers rather than pragmatic leaders. Those who quietly get the work done are not invited on talk shows or podcasts. The don't have rallies and make the evening news.
All the oxygen in the room is sucked in by the performance artists, who often say outlandish things but rarely get anything productive done.
This is true outside politics, as well. Or rather, more precisely, any organization has some amount of internal politics, and the larger and more bureaucratic it is, the more politics dominates over utilitarianism. Nation-states and their governments are on the far end of that spectrum, obviously, but it also applies equally to large corporations etc.
And the thing about it is that it doesn't just reward attention seeking. It rewards the entire spectrum of sociopathic behavior - making promises you don't intend to keep, picking associated based on loyalty rather than merit, walking on people's heads if that's what it takes to get higher etc. It's a system that positively selects for sociopathy in elites, whether they are politicians or CEOs.
And thus that is what we get. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are extreme examples of what such selection can produce, but I don't think it's a qualitative change compared to the "good old times"; rather, it's the logical end result of the gradual evolution.
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.
"enforce a set of virtues" is a weird way of saying "enforcing basic decency". Let's be clear here, people who are rightfully banned are always going to complain. Our opinions as the majority who DO want decent conversations online are not irrelevant. We should not give those people equal weight to those facing actual censorship. Fragmenting the internet will never get rid of the problem that moderation needs to happen.
To be clear, if I were in charge, there would be significantly more banning and moderation on all platforms. I am arguing moderation is more politically feasible in small communities, not that is any more or less ethical.
What is basic decency? Is it indecent to advocate for atheism or if a women posts a picture of herself not wearing a burka? Many people in certain countries would say so. Personally I think those people are insane, and that maximal freedom of expression is the most important human right, but the fundamental problem is that there is no consensus on what constitutes basic decency.
I'm not talking about cultural differences. I'm talking about people simply being assholes online. You will always have a group of people complaining about the rules, that is inevitable.
You're correct that decency is a nicer word for conformity. Preventing social discord avoids violence, but creates repression. I think the compromise is basically liberalism. Let people make their own communities. Let people switch communities, criticize other ones non-violently, enforce their own w/ democratically determined rules, etc.
Facebook has a real name policy and is a prime example of internet-fueled insanity. Why does deanonymization not help Facebook be a more positive place?
To tie it to my own view, I don’t think deanonymization has any effect if the name is meaningless to 99.9% of the community. For every person fired for posts, there are 10000 others who are not.
If companies really wanted to fire people for posts, they would start with firing people for vaguely anti-capital sentiment. Not saying racist things or whatever.
We need to be careful what we ask for. Who is effectively doing the censorship matters. Powerful people are probably not going to be censoring based on 'good morals' - because they themselves do not have good morals.
A woman wearing anything but a burqa in an extremist Islamic society would be popularly categorized as one of the "people with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies". So according to you liberal women in Iran, Pakistan, Sudan etc should not be given a safe space, is it?
freedom gets messy, authoritarian governments that rule with an iron fist seem to have things all sorted out and are very reassuring to certain types of people.
Does that also apply to people living under oppressive governments? Anonymity can be a useful tool for sharing information that those in power don't want released, for example whistle blowing.
A better solution to this would be to fragment within social media platforms. Allow users to post any content that's legal within their local jurisdiction. And give other users easy tools to create their own "filter bubbles" so that they don't see content which they personally consider insane or offensive. This would allow the social media platforms to sidestep political debates about censorship.
I have wondered if the long term trajectory of social media is as a locally governed utility, similar to energy or water. I would love a boring page landlocked to my neighborhood. Obviously there would the NextDoor "Karen" issue, that would need to be addressed somehow...
Then you get the other side of this problem, the echo chamber effect. If people self sort they'll eventually end up in social circles that are completely illegible from the realm of physical politics, which leads to a political instability of a different kind.
It's a hard problem. I think multi armed bandit based algorithms can help. Bluesky is a sort of "live" example of self filtering and it ends up creating a lot of fractional purity politics over which filter bubble is the just/moral filter bubble.
We are at this point where we need to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” again. This mass media circus of social media and influencers doesn’t help anyone except their own self centred interests.
Fair to say this is easier in Europe where we don’t have the propaganda firehose but I think it’s time to switch off US friends
There's some truth to this because "Culture is not your friend, man." Ironically though it really needs update, maybe more like turn off, tune out, rise up?
This article is advice for individuals on how to resist the societal incentives to embrace insanity. But what I'm really interested in is advice for how to fix our society so it doesn't incentivize insanity.
How do you help others if you physically restrain yourself from doing so though? I can imagine some help but it severely limits the help you can provide and needed, depending on the situation.
Scepticism taught in schools. Demonstrate manipulation on kids and conclude that even educated, intelligent minds can get entangled when they let their guard down.
> We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that infected society, but we’re missing a key data point: polarization is a growth hack, and it works.
Unfortunately the article does not explain how it works and without a problem definition, you cant reach a solution. IMO it certainly behaves like a disease.
I consider identity politics as one vector how a mind virus can take over the hosts higher order reasoning. There are certainly other vectors (cognitive biases) but IP is definetly the biggest driving factor behind todays polarization. Calling others "liberals" is primarily a signal to label an outgroup.
On what political side do you see more symbols like flags, stickers, memes, etc? Entire news cycle narratives can get deprived of meaning and act as the most recent symbol, individuals can use to signal their group membership. Any counter argument against such a holy cow gets viciously attacked or ignored because to some degree, this counter argument is an actual attack on yourself, your identitiy. Admitting errors is no big deal when nothing is at stake. The opposite example would be a very religious person loosing faith with an adrenaline rush (sweat, shiver, high heart rate, flat respiration), when the body prepares a fight or flight response because a strong, non-ignorable and contradicting thought crossed its mind.
And on what political side do you see more intelligence and broader empathy? More cognitive flexibility?
Around 2000, the internet was considered a new "printing press 2.0" for making information widely accessible. This analogy fits very well, because the first ever western book to be printed was the f'ing bible.
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.
> A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.
Exactly correct on echo chambers. I say my opinion on something and I hear the exact same responses from pro people and the exact same responses from con people. Everyone hears it.
Repeating the same words someone else does to make yourn point makes me think the other person isn't capable of considering they might be wrong.
I disagree with saying "I can see both sides". That's another echo chamber. If I say I can reasonably see both sides of an issue, one side calls me an idiot and uneducated and suc
h and the other goes straw man and how I'm a communist and/or Hitler. No. I can see why side A thinks the way they do and side B thinks the way they do.
I'm not talking about hot topics either.
I'm really starting to just want to get away from all society and/or just never have more than surface level conversations with people.
Being reasonable is basicaly the core requirement of civilization. If your culture is incapable of tolerance or variation it's also incapable of growth. It gets locked in a cyclical purity test and collapse.
Really should have mentioned algorithmic feeds too. They’re imo one of the biggest contributors to this.
Diversify your sources is a good start but without algos are a gravity well of sorts too - it pulls you into echo chambers - that are stronger than manual attempts to select diversity
I'm not 100% convinced every influencer _feels_ trapped in a world of their own making - but it's correct that truth this day is suffering a bit of a "tragedy of the commons" problem.
> The world will keep offering you bad trades, will keep rewarding positions you know are too simple to be true.
Here's a story. I'd guess there's at least a few HN folk with a similar tale.
I'm not a real believer in cryptocurrency, in its current popular form at least. Actual value would be delivered by fast transaction rates at (very) high speed, high assurance, and some kind of oversight or ability to reverse transactions (you can choose your cutoff anywhere from "convicted criminal behavior" to "I disputed a transaction on my Visa/Mastercard just because I could" but ultimately society and the law needs to be an effective backstop of the system). Yet I was introduced to the bitcoin paper sometime near its release by a PhD officemate, and was a specialist in high performance and GPU computing at the time, and resolved to go home and spend a few hours mining a coin, but instead I just chilled out when I got home. I could literally have hundreds of coins right now (or equivalent cash). For years I could have chosen to join the bandwagen, but resolved not to. Currently my parents are profiting - go figure.
So yeah the world offers some interesting trades from time to time!
In any case I found the article meaningful. I'm glad I live outside the US and its current polarization, but I feel we have the same problem growing here. Hopefully we all learn to deal with it and sort out our differences.
Switching a Japanese dumbphone (Kyocera) was the best thing I ever did. Eliminating your smartphone (as inconvenient and life altering as it may be -- you'll need to figure out a path) is probably the single most effective thing you can do to get into the top 1-10%... of people with properly functioning cognition.
1) Always listen to your rational adversary, repeat their arguments back to them to their satisfaction rather than in caricature.
2) List facts; states of affairs that are not in dispute. Adduce no fact in isolation.
3) Form the strongest version of your rational counterparts' argument.
4) Apply reason faithfully to analyze.
5) Lather rinse repeat.
It seems the above is the best humans have every been able to do, it is child's play that we somehow forgot, maybe because we labelled it as something obscure like "the scientific method" or "legal process". I think this is as simple as "follow your nose".
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.
i found it weird that this person has multiple friends that were able to "make bank" by having polarizing opinions. i know a ton of folks with polarizing opinions and none of them are monetizing it.
what kind of world is this author living in where their social circle includes so many influencers that are cashing in on social media?
I assume it was the author ratting on themselves and their para social relationships. I'm guessing "friend" here is a person the author follows on Twitter and occasionally exchanges a DM with
And the influenced are rewarded by the influencer that is validating their polarized views.
You also might be putting too fine a point on "influencer". A relative of mine on Facebook might be a kind of "influencer"—at least with regard to his small cadre of family and friends that follow him.
You can look at it it this way, but why your small circle of family and friends would reward polarizing opinions? If anything, I have seen people losing real life relationships by not knowing when to stop in online arguments
Nobody can vouch for their own sanity. Attempting to do so only make you sound insane. Incentives to be insane? Sure, but.... it is timing the stock market of ideas. Some will get rich but most will not. And sanity either has to return or insanity will destroy many lives and the society in which it is allowed free reign. In any case if you promoted insanity when sanity returns and people regain their ability to have a memory you may reap what you seeded.
> Nobody can vouch for their own sanity. Attempting to do so only make you sound insane.
Exactly, and if people deem you to be insane, you cannot do anything about that. They will find reasons for why what you are saying is out of your insanity. There is a great movie about a woman being held against her own will at the locked up psychiatric ward and it explores this.
I am 31 years old. Same experiences. You have to find the right audience. For me, it was particular IRC channels where they were still quite reasonable.
A lot of this goes away when you stop spending so much time on social media, which is a very poor reflection of "reality." Part of the problem is that there are a number of people who can't really look away, because they've built their livelihoods on it. Traditional media in many ways has come to rely on it too. Unfortunate mistake.
Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway. Just take a look at how the story around the Epstein files changes with the way the wind blows. It feels very familiar to the "Narcissist's Prayer."
> A lot of this goes away when you stop spending so much time on social media, which is a very poor reflection of "reality."
It mainly "too much time of political social media". You can always tell.
What you find is that a lot of people will be repeating talking points and/or catch phrases without putting much thought into it. A lot of this is fed to them by people who are essentially evangelists and many of these people I am convinced are given they talking points, because they all say the same thing at roughly the same time.
> Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway
They can do that if they are getting a decent turnover of new viewers. That doesn't work too well when their fanbase is declining.
If you look into the UFO land which is the worst for this and the most obvious because often the claims are ridiculous. What often happens is that someone will be outright exposed for being a fraud e.g. someone proves that a video was fake. They will then disappear for a few months or maybe a few years. During that time, many more new people would have filtered into the community and many won't look into that person's background.
I haven't used social media in over a decade and I change my mind all the time.
Changing your mind is a good thing for a thinking being.
Social media figures aren't changing their mind in the same way, they are changing and optimizing their public performance.
Professional social media is a paid performance. We understand that Tom Cruise is not really a highly skilled jet fighter pilot but a well paid actor playing the role of one. No one cares what Tom Cruise thinks about Ukraine/Russia air defense tactics. This gets hidden in plain sight with social media though and why social media is hyper stupifying.
Right, it's not so much "changing minds" in that they probably aren't thinking about much very deeply... it's more like "changing to suit the popular narrative direction"
> The returns on reasonableness have almost entirely collapsed
If you measure returns by others' approval, then you are doomed as the world is fickle. Unfortunately, as a writer or journalist you are forced to depend on approval of others.
The alternative is to sculpt a framework or scorecard largely independent of what others think - but this is hard, as we are social creatures.
> as a writer or journalist you are forced to depend on approval of others
and sometimes the disapproval of others, as we've seen with the sort of rage-baiting headlines many blogs, social media accounts, and even traditional media outlets, are writing
and the thing is... this approval/disapproval reaction isn't elicited to necessarily build coalitions, make friends, or change minds, it's often built to sell eyes-on-ads which is a completely perverse incentive that has eaten the mainstream internet
There is a large number of people that appreciate being told the truth. That model actually works better over the long term.
Grifting (which is what is often seen on social media platforms by many of the personalities) can give you large rewards quickly however you are always at risk at being found out. Once they are exposed, it is often usually over for them.
It's less that we are in echo chambers and more of being completly flooded with too many opinions.
Avacados == liberal
Steaks == conservative
The point I take is that the only way to prevent this is decrease the amount of information you recieve not increase. If you constantly read extreme opinions everywhere your brain cannot process it and therefore starts dropping everything into really big buckets. The more sides you read the bigger your buckets becomes.
Sure you're less informed but I don't think humans were designed to grok the entire world's information either.
> You get certainty in an uncertain world. You get a community that will defend you. You get a simple heuristic for navigating complex issues.
This is what faith used to provide.
I say this as a not religious person: Maybe societies really need something like religion to channel irrationality?
We've been trying religion for as long there have been humans. Tends to suffer from the same shortcomings: very easy to subvert and abuse by adversial agents (grifters, sociopaths, etc) and increases in-group/out-group thinking.
Exactly, so about that, there's good news and bad news. Epistemic and mean field game theory is eventually going to be well understood stuff and define better alternatives very, very specifically. After we understand our past completely AND can predict our future, we'll know exactly what to fix and how, but unfortunately nothing whatsoever will change anyway. Probably someone will weaponize it to actually make things worse! Cold comfort to be sure, but I personally will still sleep easier after I know exactly why we are doomed.
There is a critical problem with influencers: once they build a large audience, they often feel compelled to stick to the same message, even if they later realize it's wrong, because influence itself becomes a business and a source of power.
I think disengaging from social media is a big part of this. These advertiser and engagement fueled algorithms promote all of the insane takes as well. You find much more fulfillment engaging with people locally or people in your close circles.
I’m not on social media unless you consider HN social media (I don’t) and the world is still totally as insane as it was before the internet.
For your average city person:
The food you’re offered is sugar + preservatives, the water is either non-existent (Tehran) or poisoned with fracking gas (Flint), almost all local communities have collapsed into extreme versions of themselves, the rich and poor still don’t mingle, men fear women and women want nothing to do with men, there is no upside to having a family or children.
I just spoke at a HBS event in DC last night about robotics and on one side of the room were people starting AI companion services and in the other side people were saying AI was causing the rise of Tradwives. It was like looking at 50 “deer in headlights” when explaining how thoroughly they have already integrated third party algorithmic logic into their decision processes - and are totally unaware of it.
The real world is absurd and getting less coherent with more information available. Humans aren’t biologically equipped for the world we collectively built.
Your disconnect from Social Media and "the world still totally insane"—the latter is of course not dependent on the former. Perhaps we need to get the rest of the world also off Social Media? Off the internet?
Given that we can't do that, I choose then to continue my hobbies, take more walks, try to declutter my place, improve my health, lose weight, look for comfortable chats with my daughters, wife, friends…
I'm not sure where you see men and women not trusting one another. If I had to guess it would be that you perceive this from things you have seen on the internet?
I find the internet is kind of like that silly cave in "The Empire Strikes Back"—where you find only what you bring with you. Try looking for positive things and people and see if you are not rewarded. (And if you cannot, just drop the internet completely. I have a friend that I think checks online for about 30 minutes in the morning and then he's done for the day.)
I have teenagers headed to college. I’m seeing it first/second hand.
Across high schools in the US kids aren’t dating like they used to and are vocal about not just ambivalence but hostility toward having kids.
Oddly enough my kids want to get married and have kids and report on how it’s odd to them others positions, so if anything I’m biased the other direction from exposure.
I don’t care either way, not having kids is a valid approach, but it’s a fact that there’s going to be societal impacts.
Both are significantly different but still fail to provide the most basic service: access to clean water
I can trivially get access to plenty of clean drinking water in most “wild” places in the world, in fact that’s like the third core thing you learn in survival schools (of which I’ve attended many).
You're doing the thing that the article is talking about. Neither are average examples. I don't know about Tehran, but you have to really be cherry-picking to make a data set where Flint ends up as an average case of municipal water quality.
No it’s demonstrating that at the relative extreme ends you have the same problem thus creating the linear equation with the minimum set
The reader should deduce that any measure along the same linear map - which is effectively every city aka the “average city” - will eventually be subject to this condition (water insecurity)
You can trivially verify this by looking at issues of water insecurity and water quality issues across every size city. Notice that you will have non-trivial numbers of “boil water” events in the United States south. You may have significant periods of drought throughout your average city in sub-Saharan Africa, Sonoran desert or western China for example.
I think maybe your definition of “average” only includes modern metropolitan areas and not simply as cities where people are geographically clustering across the globe.
I lived in San Angelo Texas in 2009 and I did not have potable water in my home. I had to go to Walmart and fill 5 gallon jugs of Culligan water every few days. That’s not particularly abnormal
To be fair I offered a fairly complex/compressed way to approach this, so not easily interpreted, but nonetheless that’s the point
I felt the same thing when i was 22--kids aren't for me, this world sucks, etc etc. Eventually I "grew up," toned down short term hedonistic pleasures, read books that deepened my connection to humanity and realized family is extremely meaningful.
First off, there's nothing new about interviewing people who are in their early 20s and hearing moaning and groaning about how this world sucks and it's not worth bringing anyone into it. I'm not religious whatsoever, but there's something deeply spiritual about the human experience of family/kids. It's certainly not for everyone if you're mature enough to understand the downsides and decide not to--but the secondary point I want to make is that I think most people are naive/immature. They follow trends and take a lot of direction from social media. The endless short term dopamine hits from every corner of your life will definitely have anybody questioning -- "why would i make my life harder when i can live only for myself and continue tiktoking in the evenings for 3 hours" -- our society is fundamentally broken, and that's not just the USA. I've traveled to other places and have bumped into the social media zombies everywhere.
> this world sucks and it's not worth bringing anyone into it
What exactly is wrong ("moaning and groaning", something that you "grew up" from), in your estimation, about that perspective?
> realized family is extremely meaningful
I believe that many people with the aforementioned perspective would agree with you, but would add that reducing further suffering is an overriding priority.
The challenge is that short-term incentives can easily lead to long-term problems, as the short-term min/maxing can leave you stuck in a particular global minimum, with no clear way out.
I said global minimum, which can easily happen if you end up at local maximum, but you’ll never know unless you randomly search elsewhere (and potentially end up even lower).
The piece denies the existence of problems though.
It starts of with enragment and denailism.
The piece is the polarization.
"Diversify your information" in no way cancels single events and single counter examples.
The idea that ingesting more diversified information will bring back the lives of dead children and delete what people have done and said is ludicrous.
The problem is that a certain kind of "intellectual" does not understand how constantly pivoting or turning to statistical aggregates to avoid the discussion around a single intervention is basically a vector of attack on a system.
To stay sane, one must parse data. Literally attempt to gather data from the government. Literally take notes tracking the incoherence of the media narratives. But then you will find that merely describing reality is enough to trigger certain types of people now into frothing mania.
If you think you are intelligent you MUST realize that social media is going to do importance sampling on the things they find usefull to the business.
The defense against importance sampling is to abandon experiential aggregates entirely and focus on factless truths like incoherent, or single examplars that are enough to prove your point or raise a grievance.
Focus on counter-examples. Focus on definitti style incoherence. Live in the meta.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent. Another started treating political disagreement as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.
Uh.... The vast majority of new stories from major outlets ARE manufactured consent.
I understand what you're saying. But people who use the expression "manufactured consent" know that it comes from Chomsky and use it in the same sense as Chomsky did. It refers to the idea that the only debate that the media allows is that which doesn't challenge any actual power. Furthermore that expression also refers to the fact that this is achieved without anyone having to explicitly coerse the media. The individuals in it self-select to support with the agenda. You're allowed to be a revolutionary, but no one in the media will give you a job because they're all benefiting from the status quo and don't want to rock and boat.
For example, the left media hypes the democrats and the right media hypes the republicans. You're encouraged to debate which is better, because it doesn't actually change anything. But if there's a candidate that says "corporations have too much power and are using to exploit labour", both sides of the media will attack them.
> 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.
No, moderatism or centrism is legitimately a fallacy. The idea or intuition that, given two endpoints, the most correct position is one in the middle, is a fallacy. It depends entirely on the endpoints.
For example: the three fifths compromise. Turns out, bad. The correct answer was emancipation all along, and the 'centrist' answer was just bad. Because, well, one of the endpoints was slavery. If you 'halfway' slavery, that's still bad. There's no merits or 'well what about's when it comes to slavery.
That doesn't mean centrists or moderates are wrong - they're often right. But it DOES mean that just taking a middle of the road approach isn't reasonable. You need to actually understand why you're doing that, and why the middle makes the most sense. In some parts of the world, right now, as in right now right now, the 'both sides' argument is pro-genocide. In the past it's been pro-slavery, pro-colonialism, pro-holocaust, whatever. Plenty of really bad stuff.
So, you can't hide behind 'both sides'. You need to justify WHY 'both sides' and why in the middle is best for this particular case.
So you just did a Mote and Bailey. The initial claim was that "anyone rejecting both extremes is automatically wrong"; I pointed out that this was a weaponized defense being used by both sides to hide their BS, and instead of responding to that, you refuted the similar sounding but unrelated claim (which hadn't been made) that "the truth is somewhere in the middle".
Saying that both sides are peddling absolute bollocks is not, in any way, a claim that we'd be better off with some sort of average of the two. Both sides are mostly full of it, full stop.
Uh, no, I was responding to the notion of 'both sides ism' which I called centrism or moderatism, which is, in fact, a fallacy.
That DOES NOT mean that both sides can't do X or Y, or that moderates are wrong. What it means is there is a particular kind of person who will hide behind middle-road nothing burger perspectives, because they intuitively believe middle of the road must be reasonable.
It's not guaranteed to be reasonable. That's the fallacy. I didn't say YOU did the fallacy, I'm just explaining what 'both sides ism' is.
Now, on to you, specifically:
> Both sides are mostly full of it, full stop.
This is a nothing burger perspective. It's not interesting, or thoughtful, or intellectual, and it's barely worth the bits it's encoded in.
Yes, politicians lie. And? So what? That doesn't tell anyone anything about, well, anything.
Also, when certain politicians are lying about certain things and you say 'well everyone lies!' - you are making it worse.
You can bet your fucking ass that the reason people like Trump are able to railroad your constitutional rights is because there's droves of useful idiots who will say 'well democrats do the same thing!'
Okay? But they're not doing it right now, right? And that little tidbit doesn't magically make everything okay, right? So what have we achieved? In our quest to find the right answer, we've just justified and defended behavior that we know is bad for us. That's just self destruction.
1) The fallacy that averaging two wrong answers will somehow magically give you the correct answer.
2) The fallacy that the opposite of a wrong answer must be correct.
People who point out that partisans are committing the second fallacy are routinely accused (as you are doing here) of committing the first. This is a weaponized strategy which (somewhat ironically) employed by "both sides".
It is quite possible for A to be wrong, the "political opposite" of A to be wrong, and their "political average" to also be wrong. The correct answer, if any is to be found, may well be hiding outside of the framing that "both sides" have agreed to use. But anyone trying to point this out will be accused (again, by "both sides") of engaging in "both side ism" because it threatens their shared hegemony.
It's a stupid rhetorical trick, and adding more faux anger and swear words to your response isn't going to make me fall for it.
OP's point is that you get accused of "both sides ism" even if you merely try to examine the claims of both sides on their merits, the cardinal sin being not rejecting them outright. I'm far left myself and I've seen it plenty of time; on the left it's usually presented as, "engaging with those ideas legitimizes them".
In my opinion, the problem is that journalists in general used “both sides” rhetoric where it wasn’t warranted to avoid accusations of bias. It feels that nuance is used out of cowardice more often than not.
There’s also the fact that not all positions are equally valid or evidence based. Nuance doesn’t mean treating each position as equally valid, but evaluating each on the evidence. Journalists almost uniformly mistake “both sides” for nuance. There’s nuance in discussions about global warming, but treating “global warming is not man made” as a valid position is not an example of that.
Nuance is definitely something we need more of, but we also need to call a spade a spade more often.
>A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.
I'm a long time Jon Stewart fan and if I'm being honest, looked at the "other side" as if it was a bunch of retarded people isn't new and predate 2016. No doubt Trump and social media got conservative to embrace condescending and extreme rhetoric and pushed it to another level but let's not pretend they invented anything.
I have a hard time taking this kind of enlightened-centrist both-sides gruel very seriously. Calling every strong position "extreme" is a classic sleight-of-hand maneuver by people who want to mask their own wrong-side-of-history beliefs that they know they should feel ashamed of expressing.
Yes, yes, look for truth beyond labeled groups, but pretending that the "sides" are equal is some utterly moronic "Fair and Balanced" bullshit.
> it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.
Many issues really do have a bright dividing line. I mean, for fuck's sake, there are people who are currently fighting against releasing the Epstein files, documents that clearly incriminate pedophilic rape and sex trafficking.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent.
I think the author here doesn't actually understand what manufactured consent is, because believing otherwise demonstrates media illiteracy. Talking about our extreme filter bubbles (community/information homogeneity) in one breath and then denying the pervasiveness of manufactured consent in the next is otherwise a perfect demonstration of Gell-Mann amnesia.
"enlightened-centrist" and "both-sides(ism)" are phrases left-leaning people use to try and say "My team good, your team bad, to believe anything else is insanity/stupidity!" without coming off as a douchebag. (It doesn't work)
If you don't want to release the Epstein files, then yeah, you're bad.
If you're 'both side'-ing fucking pedophilia, take a step back and ask yourself - what the fuck are we doing here?
Sometimes people, and this includes republicans, are just pieces of shit. Sometimes someone is OBVIOUSLY wrong, and someone is OBVIOUSLY right. You are allowed to diverge from the fucking hivemind and say 'you know what, this republican sucks'.
Trump sucks man. He's a legitimately bad person and a stain on humanity. There is no alternative perspective to that. If you try to argue one, that's suspicious!
> If you don't want to release the Epstein files, then yeah, you're bad.
You can be against the Epstein files being released for numerous reasons that don't require supporting child abuse.
Here's an example:
"The files are likely inaccurate or manipulated and likely to be used for character assassination. I see numerous people on the left and right wings of the political spectrum accusing the other side of manipulating them."
That does not in any way support child abuse.
> If you're 'both side'-ing fucking pedophilia, take a step back and ask yourself - what the fuck are we doing here?
I'm unsure what you mean. This is a very emotional statement with little actual substance. If you're claiming that only Republicans participated in Epstein's child abuse ring, that doesn't seem to be true at all.
> Sometimes people, and this includes republicans, are just pieces of shit. Sometimes someone is OBVIOUSLY wrong, and someone is OBVIOUSLY right. You are allowed to diverge from the fucking hivemind and say 'you know what, this republican sucks'.
Nobody is objectively a piece of shit, nor is an opinion objectively wrong. Opposing the release of the Epstein files is not objectively or obviously wrong. What "hivemind" are you talking about? A large number of Americans hate Trump.
> Trump sucks man. He's a legitimately bad person and a stain on humanity. There is no alternative perspective to that. If you try to argue one, that's suspicious!
What do you mean, "there is no alternative perspective to that."? Are you saying that people arguing that Trump is not a stain on humanity don't hold a perspective on that matter?
This is a very angry, very Redditesque comment that is more emotional than it is logical.
What you perceive as 'Redditesque' is just a severe lack of conviction on your part. It's a kind of cowardice so powerful it can disguise itself as reasonableness.
Even when faced with villiany beyond belief, you cannot find the strength to condemn. Do you need see the poetic level of pathetic-ness in that?
You're allowed to just say 'these people suck'. Doing so doesn't make you anti-intellectual. You don't have to do backflips and contort your soul in unimaginable ways to defend people who do not deserve it.
> What do you mean, "there is no alternative perspective to that."? Are you saying that people arguing that Trump is not a stain on humanity don't hold a perspective on that matter?
Kind of, I'm saying their perspective is either not genuine or does not matter.
Right, again, when people are defending actual pedophiles, we have to take a step back.
Why are they doing it? It's probably not genuine. It's for political reasons. They probably know, deep down, that this is bad. They do. But they ignore their true feelings and argue the opposite, because they want to win in some political sense. They are cowards to their own beliefs.
Also, I never said objectively. I said obviously.
You can argue diddling kids is not objectively bad. Whatever. But it's certainly obviously bad, at least to the human beings I have met.
This is a common misconception about what it means to be against political extremes.
It does not mean "both sides have a point".
It does not mean "both sides" are equally bad.
It does not even mean that there are necessarily two sides.
The term "centrist" is used to imply and reinforce these misconceptions, encouraging people toward extremes. When you see things in black and white, of course everything is a straight line from good to evil (with you at the far end of good), so if someone only partially agrees with you, they're in the "center" and that much closer to Hitler than you. It's hard to step outside of this fantasy. But I'll try to help you.
Imagine the following dialogue.
A: "Are you Hindu or Muslim?"
B: "Neither. I'm an atheist."
A: "Oh, so you are torn between Vishnu and Muhammad."
And yes, one of the political parties is significantly more deranged than the other right now. You don't need to be extreme to see that and it is possible to vote for the more reasonable party without drinking their kool-aid.
Let's just poke this one a little bit. Does this standard apply to all people or just trans people? Why or why not? Do you think this[1] individual is who they say they are? Why or why not?
> Does this standard apply to all people or just trans people?
All.
> Why or why not?
Because the self as a concept only exists within the mind of the individual and it's sole source for determination is what that individual says. It's non-falsifiable so taking people at their word is simply the only option.
> Do you think this[1] individual is who they say they are?
Sure. There are shitty transpeople too.
> Why or why not?
See above.
And if you're asking how you prevent that person from being a threat to other people in the prison, well, there's a lot to unpack there.
For immediate solutions, solitary confinement. I don't like it as a policy but the neo-nazi movement is openly male-supremacist and this person, woman or not, is a threat to other women. If she wants to be sent to a women's prison it's the prison's duty to see that incarceration pass with as few incidents as possible, so the only logical path forward is isolation from other inmates.
For broader solutions: the fact that we segregate prisons along sex lines is going to always be a problem for trans offenders, but I also understand why that segregation exists and it's obvious. If we assume those same risks are valid, then any transwoman in a woman's prison is a threat, and any transmasculine person in a men's prison is threatened, and nonbinary folk are going to be all kinds of lost in that system. So, logically, we should expand the range of available prison facilities to account for this. Transwomen would go to a transwoman's prison, which would be identical to a woman's prison, apart from not having ciswomen in it, and vice-versa. And I guess you'd also need enby-jails too.
Though if you want my personal opinion, I think there's a much easier solution to this particular offender, and it's the same solution I'd prescribe for any Nazi, regardless of their gender identity.
Ok, so then transracial individuals[1] should be believed as well? What about those that identify as inanimate objects[2] or animals? If we accept self-identification as an inanimate object should others be allowed to treat that person as such?
> Ok, so then transracial individuals[1] should be believed as well?
I mean, "race" is a social construct too. There's nothing biologically different about a black man from a white man. It's a collection of cultural, historical and visual cues society imbues with meaning. So... in a way, it's got a lot in common with gender.
> What about those that identify as inanimate objects[2] or animals?
Yep.
> If we accept self-identification as an inanimate object should others be allowed to treat that person as such?
If someone earnestly identifies as an object, that's their prerogative. But no, others don't get to treat them like furniture or property because consent and dignity still apply to them. Identity doesn't override someone's right to safety, and it doesn't give others license to dehumanize, even in a twisted manner of affirming them.
And, as someone with an occasional spirit for some BDSM play, I am familiar with treating people like objects in a way that is edifying without being harmful to them.
Edit: It feels like you're trying really hard to find an edge case in self identification where it could be used to cause harm, as though the actual, current mechanisms of identity as imposed by society aren't also doing that. Yes, someone could use self identification to do something shitty. That is not unique to this concept and in fact this, and a variety of others, already have plenty of holes wide enough to drive a truck through to accomplish the same goal.
If your standard here is a system which is objectively verifiable, you will not meet it at any point. All of this is subjective because it all ties into the subjective experiences of individuals and the subjective analysis of systems and other individuals. There are no clear cut answers and there never will be, it's subjective turtles all the way down.
The author might want to admit that 'moderate reasonable' positions are also branded and incentivized, and can lead to lucrative jobs in the corporate media and think tank worlds and even in the social media influencer space.
What really smells bad here is the 'stupid and insane' theme - everyone who disagrees with my moderate position is living in stupid-world or lacks sanity is itself an extremist fundamentalist position held by many so-called centrists and institutional bureaucrats whose impartiality is questionable as they are economic beneficiaries of the status quo.
Relatedly, extremist positions arise from extreme conditions - a well-paid experienced factory employee who loses their job due to the corporation outsourcing manufacturing to India will likely adopt an extreme position of opposition to shareholder or venture capital control of corporate decisions, and start advocating for worker control of corporations. Does that make them stupid and insane? Or is that just the spin the shareholders and venture capitalists are trying to put on their reasonable moderate position about sharing wealth and power in a more democratic fashion?
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.
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.
> The friend who saw conspiracies everywhere built a following. Then an audience. Then a 7-figure income stream.
That person is almost certainly a grifter. If I was dishonest enough to do it, I would to.
It isn't that difficult if you are reasonably articulate, look reasonably tidy and can upload a 20 minute video once day to get an audience. A lot of these people are simply choosing a "side" and then repeating the talking points.
There are people that make 10-20k a month just reading the news and many of them aren't even good at doing that.
The sheep-people were suddenly given freedom of choice, and they immediately rushed to choose their own shepherd. This is where the enormous amount of trust in cheaftans, national leaders, and other autocrats came from. This explains the outbreak of fascism and the cult of force.
Previously, parasites on society had to compete for resources among themselves. Now they can draw them directly. In other words, the existing system of "checks and balances" has collapsed, and there is no new one yet.
If all your relationships fail in the same manner, it is likely that the problem is you.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent. Another started treating political disagreement as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.
Manufactured consent is a real thing, with mounting evidence that it's becoming increasingly prevalent. The ownership structures around major news outlets are worrisome and what many considered 'reliable' for years are now showing seriously problematic habits (like genocide erasure - lookin' at you, NYT.)
Liberalism has come under completely valid scrutiny as we've seen fiscal policies implemented by Clinton and Obama blow up in our faces. No, we don't think Reaganomics is anything but a grift, but many of us see the grift in NAFTA and the ACA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley and have begun to question the honesty of centrist liberal economic policies because we are seeing them fail catastrophically.
> The incentive gradient was clear: sanity was expensive, and extremism paid dividends.
Author is doing something subtle here - without making a defense or interrogation of the statement, they are saying "Not being liberal / centrist is extremism, and thus invalid". I call bullshit.
I have not profited or benefited from my "extreme" leftist views. If anything, I take a risk every time I talk about them out in the open. My comment history is going to be visible to all future employers. Should the government continue it's rightward slide I'll have a target painted on my back that I put there. I don't believe the things I believe because it's convenient, I believe them because in my estimation, we are operating on a set of failed systems and it's important that we fix them because they present a real and present danger.
We have Trump because Biden was utterly incapable of facing the actual problems people are having with the economic prosperity gap. If you don't address the actual hardship in people's lives, you leave the door open for a huckster to make those promises for you. Most will take the unreliable promise of a better tomorrow over being lied to about whether they even have a problem. You don't need a PhD in economics to know that whatever the GDP might be you're still broke and you can't afford to feed your kids.
Breaking people raises the GDP. It wasn't that Biden was incapable, I mean besides the dementia his party and the media hid from its viewers, he was capable of fixing the problem for the less than billionaires.
The problem is believing the other party has an alternative. The problem is belief in the other. Who we believe the other is.
The other isn't anyone who doesn't have power over you. The problem is believing people who say someone who doesn't have power over you is the other.
Really nothing in the article implied that whatsoever? It's not even about that if you actively try to read between the lines. Like--"liberal as a slur" is just a daily experience of american life these days, irrespective of the details of any of your personal relationships.
You people call you 'liberal as a slur' in real life out in the world?
Regardless, projecting your narrow experiences onto 'american life' writ large is not a sound starting point for any conversation.
It is the pairing of the term 'manufacturing consent' with "'liberal' as a slur" (from the left, not right) that evokes the genocide.
One of the primary consents manufactured in the Biden years was for exactly that.
Likewise for calls to eternal slow-walked 'nuance', instead of straightforward calls for ending the gifting of weapons to the belligerent, as has been done in living memory.
There's no 'conspiracy' (per the author) at all, Biden officials are already writing memoirs about it.
> You people call you 'liberal as a slur' in real life out in the world?
I see it online... everyday? Especially if I go back to the places I used to enjoy but have had to learn to avoid. And yes, anytime I interact with friends' parents, people in my hometown, etc, it's pretty ubiquitously used as a slur. Occasionally ironically since we're a few years past peak mind-virus (I'd like to think), but, yes, all the time.
I think they were listing two unassociated examples of the "people getting radical and weird" phenomenon in that list, not pairing them. I took "manufactured consent" as referring to the Trumpish "mainstream media is all lies" stance. Seems like you invented the israel connection out of thin air. Maybe you know something about the author, but, it wasn't in the article.
Likely not to their face, but I’ve absolutely had tons of people use it when talking to me as a slur for other people. Because they assumed I was like minded.
It’s absolutely used as a slur in conversation, yes.
I mean you have the Republican President of the United States publicly calling Democrats evil. People like to pretend their party (Democrats and Republicans alike) generally adheres to decency and decorum even though they demonstrably do not, but it’s especially rich for Republicans to act like they’re the party of decency in politics when they’re falling in lockstep with Donald Trump
Exactly this. Disengaging from the injustices ongoing in this world will likely benefit your mental health but it's a choice and we don't need your essays justifying that choice, and you trying to convince yourself that it makes you smarter than everyone else.
The article is an indictment on hackernews itself. I'm sure that won't be well received here, because of what the article says, specifically: "Start by diversifying your information diet in ways that feel actively uncomfortable."
There is almost no diversity of thought here, simply due to the algorithm. The basis of acceptance is agreeing with the main ideology here.
When the algorithm of the platform is to banish those who disagree, tribal unity is the outcome.
The algorithm doesn't allow disagreement. The algorithm is wrong and part of the algorithm is to disallow commenting on the algorithm.
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.
The author writes, “You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right”. Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue (e.g. pro-Ukraine to anti-Ukraine or vice versa) and still keep their following and ability to monetize it.
Social media is full of parasocial relationships; followers are in love with an influencer’s personality, not their views or factual content. So, the influencer can completely change his mind about stuff, as long as he still has the engaging presentation that people have come to like. Followers are also often in love with the brand relationships that the influencers flog, because people love being told what stuff they should buy.
It's more about being confident and extreme on their stance no matter what it is at that particular moment. People are attracted to personalities that are confident and says they are right all the time. Heck, personalities like that gets all the influence in the workplace too. Imagine John Doe in your office who has a solution for every problem and knows the code base like the back of their hand. You might find that they are not so right all the time (maybe 2 out of 3 times it's pure conjecture) but gosh you will go back to him for solutions the next time you run into a problem. What I am saying is that we are attracted to the extreme, the flamboyant, the controversial. Maybe it's time we prioritize critical thinking for the future generation no?
I see it as the continued corporatisation of everything. I suspect that you'd be hard press to find anyone who has ever been anywhere above middle-management in a corporate organisation who doesnt see, and chuckles at, the similarities in the worst places they've worked and this:
"Where admitting uncertainty is social suicide. Where every conversation is a performance for your tribe rather than an actual exchange of ideas. You lose the ability to solve problems that don't fit neatly into your ideological framework, which turns out to be most important problems"
Politics is the obvious one to see this effect in action but it's bled into so many facet of society now because society is one giant grey areas but our mediums don't like greys. The medium continues to be the message.
That's not corporatisation, it's basic human tribalism. If anything one of the the best things about corporations is that they can sometimes escape that kind of culture.
Sure but fwiw in 30 odd years in large corps, I’ve never come across any corp that doesn’t succumb to a sanitised form of basic tribalism
I have been a small content creator for 10 years now. I've been hampered a lot by actively discouraging these types of parasocial relationships - every now and then I'll get a gaggle of followers that spend entirely too much time on my crappy content or my personality/posts and I get extremely weirded out to the point I want to stop doing it entirely. Everyone tells me I'm doing it wrong, but I swear, 10 years ago it wasn't as much of a thing to create a cult around yourself on social media or streaming platforms. Now it's the primary monetization path.
I've even gone so far to say to more than one person, "look, I like and appreciate you really like my content or my personality, but, you don't know me at all, I don't know you, and honestly, we're not friends, no matter how much you want that to be the case. That isn't to say I dislike you, but you need to be more realistic about the content you consume, and if this hurts your feelings a lot, I'm sorry, but this content probably isn't for you."
Then there's the type of content creator that gets a following by being a huge jerk to their fans - I don't like that either. I just tell them to treat it like a TV show. It's not real, the character in the show doesn't know you or like you. Unfortunately for today's youth and media landscape this is an utterly foreign concept.
Can we like and subscribe to you? Post the link
> Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue ... and still keep their following and ability to monetize it.
And they asserted that they were totally right the entire time. That's how. And the sheep kept on following them.
There are / were a couple of right-wing shillers that were literally paid to promote Russian talking points and they just fit it right into their schtick without blinking.
Nothing on the internet is real. If it wants money or opinion or attention, consider it hostile and try to find the strings (although it's generally not worth the time to try and find the strings, just move on and do something productive instead).
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5100829/russia-election...
People are also more isolated than ever, positioning them poorly for having robust real relationships. This makes them vulnerable to mistaking "influencers" as their friends.
Yeah, "You cannot be reasonable in isolation" from the article really struck me.
the words we use matter a lot. the "pro" and "anti" anything is a pretty large reason why all discourse has become so stupid sounding and talking with people about any issue is enraging. nuance is dead. the cultural zeitgeist is being controlled by algorithmic feeds that create neuroticism (i am definitely affected), general anxiety, and anger.
My take on this is that persons are great, everyone should know a few. Groups of people on the other hand are, and always have been, genuinely pretty awful in almost every way. IMHO this is down to some really basic primate stuff that's just inevitable. Social media is a big problem because it makes it easier to create groups, and algorithms are a big problem because they essentially take all of the dynamics that would inevitably lead to conflict anyway, and accelerate them.
Groups, algorithms, and conflict itself are all things that lead to wicked problems. Each one tends to spiral, where the only solution is more of the same, and if you escape one funnel then you fall into an adjacent one. Problem: Some group is against me. Solution: Create a group to bolster my strength. Problem: People are fighting. Solution: Join the fight so the fight will stop sooner. Problem: My code is too complicated to understand. Solution: More code to add logging and telemetry. Problem: Attempting to add telemetry has broken the code. Solution: Time to start a fight
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> 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.
Indeed, and an articulate, confident defense can also be that much more insidious. I never found it hard to ignore obviously bad-faith talking heads on cable news, but when someone is on a podcast conversation with a host I like, it's much easier to nod along until that moment where they say something demonstrably false and I have to rewind my brain a minute or two to be like... wait a sec, what? How did you get to that position?
They were called Sophists in Ancient Greece and were despised by Socrates because their arguments were based, not on truth or facts, but whatever rhetoric would convince the audience.
Yes, and the antithesis of rhetoric is reason.
The quality I value in myself (and others when I find it) is a bias to doubt evidence of things I already believe, and to accept proof of things I do not believe. The bias isn't strong (that way lies madness!), but it makes your mental model of the world stronger. It's also a much better filter than "intelligent", "polite" or "articulate", which are all orthogonal to the kind of rational, open skepticism I advocate. The big downside is that such qualities are subtle and hard to judge. Tribal affiliation is, for all its faults, easy to measure.
Another point of optimism: being a persecuted (or neglected) minority can have some positive effects, if you can find your people.
And in a classic stroke of Gell-Mann amnesia, if you're questioning what you just heard, how much should you trust what you were hearing five minutes ago?
Speaking of people who are very articulate and also very wrong.
in general, maybe - In not a fan of how sycophantic he's gotten... but this was just the citing of outside studies, not his personal opinion.
Yes, it's easy to cherry-pick an obviously absurd position that could be articulately argued. But the point is that you are definitely wrong about some things and should generally keep an open mind. Even intelligent people are wrong about certain things, and in fact their propensity for rationalization can lead them into some absurd positions. But some of those positions turn out to be right, like the Earth orbiting the Sun, for example.
The grandparent's point is that articulate prose is irrelevant to the strength/correctness of the argument or intelligence of the author.
I would take it a step further and include that it has no bearing on the morality of the author.
The original claim was:
> 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.
In truth, it does no such thing. Articulate arguments serve neither as proof the person making it isn't a monster nor that they are particularly intelligent or knowledgeable about that which they argue.
Though, I would also point out that monsters can occasionally be right as well.
I think he's using the wrong word here. "Articulate" isn't enough. What you need to do is compare the arguments from both sides about the subject, especially how they address specific things. Who is using facts, who is using emotions? How do claims stand up to time?
For example, the author is articulate and wrong about needing to give consideration to republicans :p
However, there are fewer articulate (and internally consistent) defenses of flat earth theory, than say… particle physics. In my experience.
Plenty of timecube style ones, however.
That's true, but if you want one, you can find one. If you've conditioned yourself to think that articulate==credible, then sometimes it only takes one.
Yes, and this is not just due to the intelligence of the "believers" but due to the fact that describing 2=2=2 in a self-consistent way only takes understanding it while describing 2=2=3 in a way that appears self-consistent requires a true rhetorical genius.
Yeah, that really stood out to me, I feel certain positions are monstrous no matter how articulately stated. Saying something really mean in a more palatable way doesn't make it (or the speaker) less mean.
This seems like a cognitive bias on the author that they are mistaken for universal truth.
Absolutely agree. Many, many abhorrent ideas and perspectives are accepted very often due to them being deliberately well thought-out and appearing more "academic" sounding to the layperson. There are entire organizations (colloquially, "think-tanks") dedicated to writing pamphlets, books, and memos filled with eloquent in-depth talking points that get distributed to their respective talking heads. I can't blame many people today for seeing this problem as the foundation of all mainstream media, instead of taking the time to individually investigate each source of information. However it does lead to this "everything is the opposite of what we're told" hysteria the author talks about
Not all the flat earthers are true believers. Some are there just for the attention or other motives.
Even with the number of articulate examples like this are far out numbered by the number of inarticulate arguments that the rule still has merit. Exceptions do not make the rule bad.
A good rule can be a bad heuristic. In my experience this one misleads more often than it informs.
>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.
Alex Jones literally did this though starting around 2016.
This is a strong argument probably but strangely aimed here. Reading the article, it does seem like you and the author agree about everything in this regard? You are kind of just rearticulating one part of their argument as critique about them. Why?
Or where do we place the reflex here? What triggered: this author is BS, is pseudointellectual, is bad. We jump here from a small note about articulation and intelligence, to what seems like this massive opportunity to attack not only that argument, but the author, the readers, everyone. Why? Does the particular point here feel like a massive structural weakness?
What was the trigger here for you, for lack of better word? Why such a strong feeling?
There are YouTubers that have talked about their struggle to change content that they discuss in their channels. The general advice is, make a new channel for a new topic because of how fans and their attention work. One YouTuber I occasionally watch talked about how they at first got hate mail when changing their topic because people in their old topic perceived the YouTuber to be one of the only voices in that field.
My guess is Alex Jones is actually a big enough personality to be able to have a brand independent of his ideas. Not every creator has that luxury.
Not every internet comment is a disagreement with what it's replying to.
The entire "media intended for voluntary casual consumption" industry is rife with these sorts of "gotta keep doing what you're known for" traps. Pretty much every industry with minimal product differentiation is like this to varying extents. Sorry my examples weren't completely devoid of exceptions <eyeroll>.
Anyway, two can play this stupid game. Why is it such a problem that I'm alleging this content is basically scratching the same itch in the same way as tabloids but for different demographics? Why do you feel the need to make this out to be an attack on everyone rather than a narrowly targeted "the world do be the way it is" criticism?
I don't really think its a problem and didn't indicate as such. Its why I was asking questions, trying to reconcile arguments, and overall not trying to assume one way or the other. But I can see I somehow have wasted your time regardless, sorry about that!
For everything else, sorry, I really don't know what you are saying, but your kind of righteous anger at the author is something I can certainly respect even if I am not quite sure what context you are coming from here. "Media intended for voluntary casual consumption" seems to be a pretty wide net.. what are you trying distinguish with that phrase? Media whose consumption is compulsory and not casual.. Maybe like educational/job training videos I guess? Instructional manuals? Also, what is the author here known for, that they have to keep doing? Really trying to parse here, is it maybe just "being intellectual"?
Small aside, but it's easier to talk to my cat recently then to try and use any form of prose to communicate something successfully on HN. The breakdown of communication is almost surreal these days and I don't even know what to point to. Threads get like 3 levels deep and it just becomes a mess! While never perfect, this used to be such a great place for deep discussion, whats changing?
As a long time proponent of reasonable-ism I disagree with a lot of this. The assumption that a lot of our problems stem from 2 sides just seeing an issue differently is just nonsense in this day and age.
The big Problem, is that one side has slid heavily into authoritarianism, and the other side is completely ill-equipped to fight it.
On any particular issue, the right will say whatever gets them more Power, and the left will bring out some sort of philosophy professor to try and pick apart the nuances of the conversation.
For real. Honestly, the idea that all people are good and caring and just see things differently is the comforting lie.
I really really want to believe it. You get to feel happy about humanity, smarter than all the hysterical people, etc,
It took so so so much evil from the Republicans to convince me that they are Not a reasonable side, do Not warrant any consideration, and that people who follow them Are morally corrupt.
I was thinking about this while reading the article. 15 years ago I prided myself on actively searching out opposing views and engaging with them. I still do that in the small scale, talking with coworkers or friends who have opposing views, but where the fuck can you find any reasonable conservative commentators these days. What are the most prominent voices? People like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder? They don't have an intellectually honest bone in their body.
How the hell can you even get a balanced view in terms of news/media you consume when one side is dominated by lunatics and bad actors.
At this point isn't the balanced view simply the non-conservative view?
Don't listen to Democrat party propaganda either of course, but there's much less of that and it's slightly more aligned with reality.
Oren Cass and Commonplace are pretty good writers on the US Republican side.
I'm not familiar with Ben Shapiro or Steven Crowder but what makes you so sure that their point of view is unreasonable? It seems you agree that their viewpoint is opposing, which likely means their premise are different, so isn't it entirely possible that their conclusion is reasonable and logical when one starts from their position?
Also, there isn't one source that can represent the "conservative" viewpoint because there isn't one conservative viewpoint. There are many factions within the Republican party with sometimes shockingly different points of view. Just like the Democratic party representing the "liberal" agenda.
I could just as easily ask, where is the one source I go to get an understanding of the liberal agenda? (Just a rhetorical question, I actually don't follow the news and don't plan to.)
Sure. When you start from the axiom that people unlike yourself are evil and must be harmed at all costs, you might end up near those positions. However, most people don't have that axiom, and we shouldn't attempt to compromise those who do, but should fence them (as in a distributed system fencing failed nodes).
How can you speak on this conversation at all if you're not familiar with anything?
And you don't realize there are problems on both sides?
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5. If you don't care about the Bible, I strongly recommend the Tao Te Ching. Probably the most succinct, KISS philosophy and spirituality book ever written in the history of mankind.
To misquote Alan Watts, all other religions are for people that need the Tao explained with too many words.
My favourite version to start with, and even more succinct than the original, is Ron Hogan's https://terebess.hu/english/tao/ron.html then you can move on to fancier translations.
Second this comment. The Tao Te Ching is about as close to a “right answer” in metaphysics as we’re likely to get.
Even after going around the houses for 2500 years, eventually philosophy reached Wittgenstein who had to hold his hands up and say “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” which is pretty well a summary of what Lao Tzu was pointing at.
I highly recommend Ursula Le Guin's translation.
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/lao-tzu-the-tao-te-ching
So you're suggesting an Eastern philosophy and spirituality instead of a Western one. I've listened to both Jordan Peterson and Eckhart Tolle, the difference is quite big but both points of view are interesting.
I would replace your number 5 with "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" or "MacBeth" or "Calvin & Hobbes" or maybe even Natsume's "I am a Cat." Also fun fictional books with impressive protagonists.
Other than that, your first four points are wonderful.
As an atheist, I do find some use for the Jefferson Bible. (US Founding Father) Thomas Jefferson collected all the best parts of the Gospels, dropped the miracles, some of the stranger allegories, but kept all the sermons (the things Jesus was said to have directly taught). It's about 14 "letter" pages, so almost "pamphlet" sized. As far as I'm concerned it finds most of the baby in the bathwater (IMO, so much bathwater), is an easy read, and says some things much more succinctly that I think a lot of Christians might be surprised to find are core teachings of Jesus in the Bible.
I sometimes wonder what the country would be like if every hotel desk was more likely to have a copy of the Jefferson Bible than the Gideon Bible.
Strongly agreed. Reading the actual bible is (mostly) boring as sin. There are a couple of gems in there that you can just take on their own though.
My personal favourite is Ecclesiastes which, apart from a couple of lines of slop added by a later author, has little to do with Abrahamic religion and is more just a little nugget of proto-existentialism.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ecclesiastes%20...I read Ecclesiastes back in 2019. It's probably one of the more interesting books in the Bible. I wasn't particularly impressed with it, but it's a short read, so I still think it's a good suggestion, especially if you're atheist or agnostic.
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> Jesus is not fictional.
There is apparently evidence that there was a Jesus¹ who preached and was crucified for causing a pain for those in power. But the version of Jesus in the bible is likely no more real than the Abraham in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012).
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[1] or someone going by another name which became Jesus over time, many names in the new testament are suspiciously unlike those likely to be found in the middle east in the first century CE.
Not at all. The bible is famously allegorical which is known by everyone who practices catholicism, but the historical evidence and written records are quite clear - there was this incredibly charismatic guy who grew a following, helped the poor and got crucified.
> there was this incredibly charismatic guy who grew a following, helped the poor and got crucified.
What historical evidence supports that Jesus helped the poor?
There are non-christian references to Jesus in roman/jewish history books written in the same century, which give pretty strong support to the idea he was an actual person and was killed for his charity 'work' that catered to the poor and sick. Obviously no real 'historical evidence' is possible beyond that.
Sorry, I studied this ~30 years ago, and am not really in the mood to dig for more details :)
When you see the multiple conflicting written records, and actually look at the historical evidence, the only thing that is clear is that people keep curating what people read so they have ‘a clear written record’ that benefited them at the time. Not that the record was ever clear or unconflicted. Sometimes it was really obvious (Council of Nicea, the Anglican ‘reformation’, other times a lot more subtle - like check out what the Dead Sea scrolls say).
This should be especially clear for anyone that has studied the history of the Catholic Church, eh?
Frankly, while I’ve read many versions of the Bible (and a version of the Koran and Hadiths), the underlying theme that has always struck me is how apparent it is that at least the self-stated followers of the book i’ve met never have?
Or if they have, blanked out very large portions of it. Typically the most outspoken ones, anyway.
The new testament is also famously contradictory (as is the old, but not so obviously nor so much so). When it was pulled together from multiple sources a shoddy editing job was done.
And the old testament is taken as allegorical when it would be inconvenient for the believers to follow exactly, but taken very literally in specific parts when people want others to live a certain way. Or just ignored completely, like the existence of other gods being specifically mentioned (though IIRC not necessarily as equals) which stands in contradiction to the monotheistic view.
It is great that Jesus works for you, but you have to separate real-Jesus versus storybook-Jesus. No doubt he lived, but written stories can be elaborated on.
For all I know, Jesus could have been the world's first great magician. The world has seen quite a few people in it, some quite remarkable - for which stories have been written. No deity or supernatural abilities need to apply.
Words in a book/internet aren't always the truth.
You are right, faith is always needed.
Don't fall into a fallacy: just because "no deity or supernatural abilities need to apply" doesn't mean that a deity or supernatural abilities haven't applied.
The only honest positions we can take are: I believe / I don't believe.
I'm happy if you find calm in your faith, but one of the biggest cause leading our insanity is the idea "both side can be the truth and it's all about what you believe" when in most cases one is much more likely than the other. This causes alternative facts and idiocracy. There are a lot of "facts" online so we can "choose" the most comfortable one, and "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge".
> Jesus is not fictional.
Strong claims require strong evidence. Some book written by many, some properly delusional or crazy folks, claiming various outlandish things not physically possible these days (staying away from word "lies" but not too far, basic physics laws worked the same 2000 years ago).
Or preaching behavior absolutely unacceptable these days (Old testament would force you to be murderer pretty quickly nowadays, and I haven't heard a single Christian rejecting all of it... they can't so just they ignore most of it like it doesn't exist). All this decades and centuries after claimed facts, that ain't a proof in any sense. You can believe it for sure, I can choose to believe in Great Spaghetti Monster and its holy teachings and its about the same.
There are no contemporary roman records from that time, earliest (with both eyes squinted and a lot of wishful thinking) is more than century afterwards. Quite an impressive record for claimed son of God, or God himself or whatever it should be.
I've been reading a bit about various sects recently, today it was Jim Jones and his escapades. With enough steps back, it all looks exactly the same, including behavior of believers. To the very last bolt. Tells you a lot about humans and how they internally try to handle tough times, but not much else.
So please, lets have a more rational discussion rather than level our grandparents may consider passable but many of us don't.
> Strong claims require strong evidence.
Believing a Jewish man formed his own religious sect and was crucified isn't exactly a strong claim.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus#Existence...
Sure, but saying that such a person "is Jesus" is a strong claim.
I mean, ignore the name itself[0], and the iconography[1], and the things that can be justified by misunderstandings[2], and that the reason he got stabbed in the belly by the Roman soldier was because dying that fast was incredibly suspicious: do you really think there's evidence for someone in that era, actually making genuinely lame people walk, actually blind people see, and actually coming back from the dead?
The account can be fictional even when the person exists. Consider how there's a lot of people today, even on Hacker News, who say that Elon Musk "single-handedly" did all the things done by the companies he owns and the people employed there, and then imagine those "single-handedly" accounts became a book, and people deified his memory a century later based on the "single-handedly" claims in that book — even though there's a real Musk behind it, the person in the book would be a fiction inspired by the truth.
[0] Which will obviously be wrong, given a few layers of mis-hearing, phonetic transcription, ambiguous reading of that transcription, and the way that even William Shakespeare wrote his own name a bunch of different ways none of which is the currently mandatory one to avoid getting dinged points for mis-spelling in an English exam
[1] ironically meaning that almost all Christians will be worshiping a false idol: https://youtu.be/9nPLAlqsWgM?si=spnKIDohGNsocTXm
Also, the Cult of Mithras would have things to say if they were still around…
[2] Take the feeding of the 5000, and apply the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on the reporting: you could have an actual reality of lots of people bringing their food, not wanting to share, the disciples being told to share what they have, that creating social pressure from everyone else to share, and it's entirely plausible for this kind of thing to be reported as a "miracle" even today, if you look around at the parts of the world press willing to use that kind of language.
Then there's walking on water, where you get the punchline to the old joke about the Priest, the Rabi, and the Wiccan who go on an inter-faith fishing trip together…
Virgin birth: First, the joke about Joseph being a gullible cuckold who just believed the excuse Mary cooked up; second, the possibility of Mary being assaulted while she slept and genuinely not knowing it happened; thirdly, "virgin" having other meanings besides current use; fourthly, pregnancy is possible from dry humping, so technical virginity may be preserved: https://www.allohealth.com/blog/reproductive-health/pregnanc...
The USA brand of 'christianity' is very un-christian-like. In strong catholic countries like most of South America, the old testament is all but entirely rejected, and even the new one treated as mostly fables - they teach you some kind of lesson, not history.
Christopher Hitchens gives the best argument for a historical Jesus in this clip
https://youtu.be/vMo5R5pLPBE?t=168
As far as I know the scholarly consensus is that there was a "Jesus" who founded the Christian cult. The only claim being made is that such a person likely existed, not that they were the son of God or actually performed miracles. Just that he wasn't entirely made up. He wouldn't have even been the only "messiah" for whom such claims were made, and the teachings ascribed to him weren't even unique.
Here is a video from the Esoterica Youtube channel which tries to present a historical view of Jesus grounded in contemporary Judaism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82vxOBbYSzk
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207&ver...
Note that "feeds" is a confusing word choice; I immediately thought of something RSS-like which often links to long-form content.
For news, my rule is to check major headlines at most once a day (often less in practice), so I am at least vaguely aware what people are talking about. Doing it this way makes it clear how ... banal? ... most clickbait is. Something local might be useful; if they mention something national it's probably actually semi-important. Though, if you can't change anything about it, is it really?
If reading the Bible, I strongly suggest starting with Matthew 5 and continuing from there, not too fast (maybe one chapter per week, so you can stop and think about it). This gets straight to the mindset, as opposed to the handful of protrusions that make it to the pop-culture version. [I have a lot more I could say about how to read the Bible, but it's no use posting it again unless someone is interested.]
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205&ver...
Personally, I really like Luke because of how clearly it is structured.
Consider me interested
Okay, so apparently HN has a comment size limit.
Normally I customize this a bit based on exactly where my audience is coming from, and sometimes what question was asked. For HN I guess I'll assume someone who is aware of the pop-culture version of Christianity (which honestly describes a lot of people who went to church as a kid), not an active Christian, dabbling a bit in philosophy, and capable of understanding big words.
(Technically, "The Bible" is plural meaning many books. But in English we usually treat it as a single book despite using "the book of X" for its componentse)
The Bible is not a novel, and it is a grave mistake to try to read it like one. The Bible is also not a textbook, though that's closer.
If we treat it as a philosophy book, I'd say the core theme would be "What is sin, what does that imply, and what can we do about it?", though this is often implicit, and much of the book is in the form of negative answers. I expect that if a reader doesn't ultimately "get" the mindset behind this question, the Bible will never make sense, never see it as anything more than arbitrary rules interspersed with random supernatural events. Yet, I also don't think approaching the Bible from this big-picture perspective is particularly useful - certainly, many people who read it are not into philosophy (as we now mean the word) at all.
Rather, the Bible is food. You need to eat it regularly or you'll starve, and you need to give it time to digest or you will expel it without it taking effect. Like food, you should have a variety; some parts are not meant to be taken alone, while a few favorite superfoods you could in fact survive on if you had to. Some parts are low-density and some are high-density.
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The "Sermon on the Mount" in chapters 5 through 7 of Matthew is some of the highest-density content in the Bible, and (orthogonally) is designed for immediate practical use. It's even possible to spend a whole week studying a single verse for some of it (and ~3 verses per week for the rest), though I do not recommend this for newcomers. Even if you are missing 99% of the point and have no idea what you are doing, you can still get something out of these chapters if you're taking them at a rate of one chapter per week.
A rate of one chapter per week is sustainable throughout the gospels and several other frequently-read books; for some other books, maybe 5 chapters per week is appropriate. Note however that chapter size varies quite a bit (~15 and ~50 are common) and chapters are not in the original (so if you're doing this alone, feel free to split or merge chapters even if the density is right, and consider verses from the adjacent chapters for context). For the "per week", at least in the high-density parts, I suggest reading the whole thing one day, then on later days focusing on a few verses that jumped out at you, and keep them in your thoughts as you go out for your daily life.
From Matthew 8 onward, the content density isn't as extreme but it's still pretty high, and by now you're starting to get your feet under you.
For a first read, I actually recommend finishing Matthew without ever going back to the first 4 chapters (not that you can't, I just don't have a good place for them), then reading Luke (which includes an even more extended start than Matthew has), Acts (the explicit sequel to Luke), and John (the gospel according to, not the epistles of) in that order. At one chapter per week, this will take about 2 years (note that part of the reason for this order is because some people might not think they want to commit to that). After this, start poking around well-known books or parts thereof (see below), then come back to do Mark. After this it's open season. At some point, learn to use margin references to discover new chapters to study.
As a rule, in any given year, you should spend half your time in the gospels (which is common but sloppy shorthand for "the gospel according to {Matthew,Mark,Luke,John}"; strictly speaking "gospel" refers to "this is Jesus, the accessible and reliable solution for sin"), though not necessarily going chapter-by-chapter like the first time. When you eventually start reading the more difficult or low-density-food books, I suggest alternating on a more frequent basis, like every other week. Or, quite possibly if you're still here, you might be doing two independent study lines the same week - perhaps one assigned for a group, the other chosen by you personally.
Some good books to consider reading, but only after Acts (and in my plan also John) include: Ruth, Jonah, the first half of Daniel, any of the short epistles (some specifically suggest James). There are also many scattered famous chapters in other books but I keep failing to make a list thereof. You will usually find references to these in the margin so don't be afraid to follow them (I'd suggest gradually ramping up how often you do this as you go through your second or third gospel), just don't get distracted from going through the gospels until you've finished them all at least once. Hebrews 11, however, is remembered for being a chapter that many of the margin references are made from.
Note that the Bible is in part sorted by similarity. As a result, it is often a bad idea to go from one book to the adjacent books. This is particularly notable for Kings/Chronicles (two retellings of the same events) and several of Paul's epistles (same advice written to different people), but also applies within the Psalms (and Proverbs/Ecclesiastes, but they're shorter).
Some books that can be a bit of a slog, and/or with little food content in parts, yet are somewhat reliant on sequencing: Genesis through Joshua, Ruth through Nehemiah, and the two epistles to the Corinthians (other numbered epistles are more independent). To be clear, there absolutely are even large portions therein that are both easy to read and profitable, but you should still approach them with deliberation.
Some books to avoid for a while: Judges (full of negative examples), Job (much dreary philosophy which is immediately rejected), arguably Ecclesiastes (but other people like it), Song of Songs/Solomon, all of the prophets except sometimes when excerpted (Isaiah in particular is commonly cited), arguably Romans (I personally don't find nearly as hard as Hebrews, but others disagree), Hebrews (but chapter 11 is very notable to read on its own), Revelation (so many people go insane after reading it, it's not even funny).
This is not the only way to read the Bible, and certainly there are other good ways, but I do have reasons for my particular choices especially for someone with no foundation.
(possibly the limit is 8k or 10k characters)
A brief note on Bible translations.
All translations are biased. Some translations have their bias obvious (which is good) or aimed at a target that is no longer applicable (also good); others are subtly problematic.
Avoid, at all costs, any translation that goes nuts with paraphrasing (moderate paraphrasing is usually okay). Mostly this means The Message. Also avoid any translation that is only used by a single denomination; semi-related to this, I also suggest avoiding any "study Bible", which inevitably consists more of third-party ideas telling you want to think about the passage rather than just reading it for yourself. I have nothing, however, against mere narrow-margin cross-references and rare single-word translation notes.
Other than that, for the gospels it doesn't matter much. Outside the gospels the differences become much more apparent.
The KJV (sometimes KJB or AV) has been highly influential on the English language (and, per its preface, the translators were very aware it would be). If you can stand the "thee"s and "thou"s (which do add important pluralization meaning in some places) and archaic spellings, it remains of excellent quality in most passages - better, even, than many modern translations. Its biases mostly fail to take hold of a modern audience. However, it does measurably suffer from the lack of modern linguistic scholarship in some passages (mostly, idiom-like things in the Old Testament, especially Job/Psalms/Proverbs and the prophets). Traditional editions do lack the quotation marks and paragraph flow that modern translations tend to use (though basic paragraph marks are usually present). Note that what people actually use is usually the 1769 edition, not (as some only-ists claim, the "original" 1611 which is unreadable), though there are some minor variations (such as "graffed" vs "grafted").
If you want something that keeps the KJV's advantages but is more modern, the ASV is mostly obsolete, but the NKJV is recent and pretty common (at the cost of giving up on the pluralization disambiguations). The KJ21, though much rarer, is quite useful because it does preserve the pluralization but modernizes the rest of the wording.
The NIV is popular, but I actually find it quite problematic. I have caught it on several occasions flat-out making something up, far beyond what can be explained by being a moderate paraphrase or even preferring different manuscripts. In particular, if someone in a debate cites the NIV, they're probably wrong. I think I've only once found a verse where the NIV gave a useful reading where other translations did not.
The ESV is not bad. It has its (unavoidable) biases but they are mostly of the obvious sort despite being aimed at a modern audience. However, I have found a few places where it introduces errors and ambiguities not in the KJV, such as Luke 22:31-32 (rigor summary for this verse: KJV/KJ21/NRSV/NASB good, NKJV bad as usual, NIV good for once, ESV bad for once). It is also prone to the problem of there being different editions in the wild with non-obvious differences.
The NRSV and NASB also seem relatively widely regarded, though I'm less familiar with them despite using them as parallels. They do succeed at the Luke 22 rigor test, at least in the versions I happen to have accessible (unfortunately, like the ESV, they do have non-obvious version differences).
There are a handful of other decent translations not mentioned here. But there are also a lot of low-quality translations, as well as minor variants of existing translations.
The YLT (not the Mormon "Young") is obscure but useful if you don't know enough Greek/Hebrew to efficiently use an interlinear directly, because it goes all in on literal translation, even for verb tenses that are unconventional in English.
Thank you, I appreciate this
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> Read the Bible. Even if you do not believe, Jesus is the most impressive human I've ever learned about.
You might also find it edifying to learn about Socrates. His trial and punishment are as compelling as Jesus' and I his existence is more likely to be an historic fact.
Yes, they are similar and in both cases what we know about them was passed down by their unreliable students with an agenda. I have studied both over the past few years and I find myself disagreeing with Plato's Socrates often whereas I find the Jesus of the Gospels much harder to argue against.
I think that Plato's dialogs are well worth reading too.
Also, just so you know, Jesus is as or more historically "likely to be real" than Socrates (three major works written by two people who knew Him, multitudes more written by those who knew those who knew Him, mentions by multiple historians of the period, a thriving cult in spite of vicious persecutions, etc.). Socrates has three contemporaries (Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes) and then the writings of Plato project him beyond his time and into the philosophical context.
But perhaps you mean "the Jesus of the Gospels" as opposed to "Yeshua ben Yoseph min Natzret" when you said "historic" here (there's good arguments for Jesus-of-the-Gospels being Yeshua ben Yoseph too, but one thing at a time).
> 5. Read the Bible. Even if you do not believe, Jesus is the most impressive human I've ever learned about. When I started reading it I was agnostic.
Yeah, read the whole Bible — the one people swear on in court, the one the preachers hold and up and tell you it is the word of god — and don't cherry-pick. So much misogeny and shit behavior. How about this one:
“David and his men went out and killed two hundred Philistines. He brought their foreskins and presented them as payment in full to become the king's son-in-law. Then Saul gave his daughter Michal to David in marriage.”
Yeah, let's kill those Philistines! Yeah, two hundred human beings! And let's cut off their foreskins because that's not remotely sick and dysfunctional at all and make a gift of them. Seems to be behavior that was rewarded.
Word of the Lord is basically sick fucking shit.
Because its entirely man made
It a description of what happened.
God doesn't seem to disapprove of murdering 200 people.
I like the Bible too. It is unfortunate but not unexpected that it set off such a firestorm in the replies.
I would even go so far to say that even nonbelievers would find much value in it, just reading at least the top stories and passages the Old and New Testaments. These are foundational cultural texts that bridge centuries of peoples. And if you are a nonbeliever who wants to read beyond the popular well known parts, please do! But read with a mind to connect with others, not divide.
There are other good things to read too. Plato, Shakespeare, the Chinese Classics, Greek Mythology, folktales. Things that people share with those around them as well as their ancestors
What is it with HackerNews constantly recommending religion to people as some cure-all?
Anecdata:
I've never seen so many Christmas lights go up this early in my little neck of the wood
They started doing heavy Black Friday sales ads almost immediately after Halloween this year, more so than I remember from even covid (but that's just my memory)
The Christmas radio station started a full 3 weeks early this year. Typically it's after 6pm on Thanksgiving day that they start.
Overall, people are worried right now. Religion slots right in there too.
The Bible is meant to conflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, as the saying goes.
I saw a Halloween display at a Walgreens in late July. I saw artificial Christmas trees for sale at Home Depot in September. I don't know what's happening but selling goods related to a holiday 3 months early seems excessive. What's next? Back to school displays before school is even let out for summer? Easter displays just after New Year's? Valentine's Day cards for sale in mid-November?
Algorithms that are profit-motivated (trying hard to get you hooked) also reward "engaging" content which means clickbait, ragebait and content that often triggers some emotions and is easy to consume. So not the most balanced content.
> Social media + recommendation algorithms = echo chambers.
In actual tests, non-algorithmic feeds become similarly extremist: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-p...
how can you comment on hacker news that you don't consume news?
I'd argue it's mostly trade news here, I'd assume the OP means commercial broadcasting, newspaper websites and the likes.
Very different for your psyche in my experience.
Depends on your trade I guess.
lots of links to newspaper websites on hn in my experience.
Or social media, at that.
Let me leave a comment on hacker news (both news and social media) that I don't consume news or social media.
Would assume its more about pop culture news
They're definitely talking about the news. The daily news isn't good for your mental health. Many alarmist stories and polarising ones on regular news sites and tv news.
Let me insert one more: you have to spend some time with your own thoughts.
Whatever you read, whatever you listen to, if you do not actually stop to consider it, by taking a long walk without headphones or scribbling in a notebook perhaps, you can’t know what you think.
And I suspect this is what’s happening to a lot of people. It’s easy to perform a psychological DDOS on yourself with doomscrolling or YouTube or podcasts or cable news in a way that’s actually really hard to do with a 500 page book.
There’s plenty of wisdom in the Bible. The book of Proverbs resonates with me the most.
Re: 5
The Jefferson Bible [1] is excellent in this regard. He removes all miracles and most mentions if the supernatural in a cut & paste job of a King James version of the Bible. The result is portraying Jesus as a person, not divine.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible
Thomas Jefferson knew Greek and Latin (was a "polymath" of the old Enlightenment era sort) and used somewhat more original sources than King James, translating them himself into English. He probably did cross-check the King James Edition for some of the English wording, or at least couldn't entirely escape its orbit/gravitational pull, but it is mostly true the Jefferson Bible was a fresh early-American translation.
I think you could replace 5 with the golden rule.
Going well until (5) .. beyond the basic textual questions (old or new Testament? Which translation? Apocrypha or not?), you then have to confront the relationship of the actually existing churches to the text.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent
There is nothing stupid about this and it is a massive problem with Western news. Different anchors across different networks presenting news with the same words as if they were handed off the exact same script to read out, to emphasize the same talking points, etc. They make AI slop look so good. I fully stopped watching US News a few years ago.
Great advice there, and I must especially echo bullet 5 here, read the Bible. One point of disagreement though: I don't believe Jesus left us the option of believeing he was just a good moral teacher. (Liar, Lunatic, Lord)
Shoot I don't think I can edit my reply via this app, but I think the misinterpreted the comment I was replying to. Apologies. Anyways read the Bible
No.
When I go to the polling place to cast my vote for the candidate of my choice; I am often holding my nose and voting for the one who I think will do the least damage. I often wonder why sane, rational problem solvers are not on the ballot.
Then I realize that our system often rewards the attention seekers rather than pragmatic leaders. Those who quietly get the work done are not invited on talk shows or podcasts. The don't have rallies and make the evening news.
All the oxygen in the room is sucked in by the performance artists, who often say outlandish things but rarely get anything productive done.
This is true outside politics, as well. Or rather, more precisely, any organization has some amount of internal politics, and the larger and more bureaucratic it is, the more politics dominates over utilitarianism. Nation-states and their governments are on the far end of that spectrum, obviously, but it also applies equally to large corporations etc.
And the thing about it is that it doesn't just reward attention seeking. It rewards the entire spectrum of sociopathic behavior - making promises you don't intend to keep, picking associated based on loyalty rather than merit, walking on people's heads if that's what it takes to get higher etc. It's a system that positively selects for sociopathy in elites, whether they are politicians or CEOs.
And thus that is what we get. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are extreme examples of what such selection can produce, but I don't think it's a qualitative change compared to the "good old times"; rather, it's the logical end result of the gradual evolution.
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.
"enforce a set of virtues" is a weird way of saying "enforcing basic decency". Let's be clear here, people who are rightfully banned are always going to complain. Our opinions as the majority who DO want decent conversations online are not irrelevant. We should not give those people equal weight to those facing actual censorship. Fragmenting the internet will never get rid of the problem that moderation needs to happen.
To be clear, if I were in charge, there would be significantly more banning and moderation on all platforms. I am arguing moderation is more politically feasible in small communities, not that is any more or less ethical.
"virtues" is just a loaded word now unfortunately.
Let’s bring it back! I think being honest is good!
What is basic decency? Is it indecent to advocate for atheism or if a women posts a picture of herself not wearing a burka? Many people in certain countries would say so. Personally I think those people are insane, and that maximal freedom of expression is the most important human right, but the fundamental problem is that there is no consensus on what constitutes basic decency.
I'm not talking about cultural differences. I'm talking about people simply being assholes online. You will always have a group of people complaining about the rules, that is inevitable.
You're correct that decency is a nicer word for conformity. Preventing social discord avoids violence, but creates repression. I think the compromise is basically liberalism. Let people make their own communities. Let people switch communities, criticize other ones non-violently, enforce their own w/ democratically determined rules, etc.
Nah, the solution is deanonymization.
People with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies should not be given a safe space.
Facebook has a real name policy and is a prime example of internet-fueled insanity. Why does deanonymization not help Facebook be a more positive place?
To tie it to my own view, I don’t think deanonymization has any effect if the name is meaningless to 99.9% of the community. For every person fired for posts, there are 10000 others who are not.
If companies really wanted to fire people for posts, they would start with firing people for vaguely anti-capital sentiment. Not saying racist things or whatever.
We need to be careful what we ask for. Who is effectively doing the censorship matters. Powerful people are probably not going to be censoring based on 'good morals' - because they themselves do not have good morals.
For every person fired for posts, there's a lucrative Fox News commentator gig.
Because Facebook monetizes the engagement of its formerly reasonable users by selling that engagement to spam bot farms?
A woman wearing anything but a burqa in an extremist Islamic society would be popularly categorized as one of the "people with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies". So according to you liberal women in Iran, Pakistan, Sudan etc should not be given a safe space, is it?
freedom gets messy, authoritarian governments that rule with an iron fist seem to have things all sorted out and are very reassuring to certain types of people.
You said it brother!
We should make everyone who disagrees with baxuz where name tags on their chest in the real world too. So we can know who they are.
We can even put the names on a bright yellow six sided star. That way everyone can see them clearly.
Does that also apply to people living under oppressive governments? Anonymity can be a useful tool for sharing information that those in power don't want released, for example whistle blowing.
If anyone should be given a safe space, then everyone should be given a safe space.
So that people with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies who are in power can come back at the de-anonymized people. Yeah, thanks.
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A better solution to this would be to fragment within social media platforms. Allow users to post any content that's legal within their local jurisdiction. And give other users easy tools to create their own "filter bubbles" so that they don't see content which they personally consider insane or offensive. This would allow the social media platforms to sidestep political debates about censorship.
I have wondered if the long term trajectory of social media is as a locally governed utility, similar to energy or water. I would love a boring page landlocked to my neighborhood. Obviously there would the NextDoor "Karen" issue, that would need to be addressed somehow...
Then you get the other side of this problem, the echo chamber effect. If people self sort they'll eventually end up in social circles that are completely illegible from the realm of physical politics, which leads to a political instability of a different kind.
It's a hard problem. I think multi armed bandit based algorithms can help. Bluesky is a sort of "live" example of self filtering and it ends up creating a lot of fractional purity politics over which filter bubble is the just/moral filter bubble.
Sounds like bluesky
> You get certainty in an uncertain world. You get a community that will defend you. You get a simple heuristic for navigating complex issues.
Like religion
Religion artifacts exists in part for organizing communities. For example, The Ten Commandments were revolutionary and short.
Too short, clearly, given that a large patch was issued almost immediately.
We are at this point where we need to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” again. This mass media circus of social media and influencers doesn’t help anyone except their own self centred interests. Fair to say this is easier in Europe where we don’t have the propaganda firehose but I think it’s time to switch off US friends
There's some truth to this because "Culture is not your friend, man." Ironically though it really needs update, maybe more like turn off, tune out, rise up?
> this is easier in Europe where we don’t have the propaganda firehose
quite ironic, given that we're talking about cognitive dissonance amongst other things
This article is advice for individuals on how to resist the societal incentives to embrace insanity. But what I'm really interested in is advice for how to fix our society so it doesn't incentivize insanity.
Reminds me of seatbelts on airplane, put them first before trying to help others.
How do you help others if you physically restrain yourself from doing so though? I can imagine some help but it severely limits the help you can provide and needed, depending on the situation.
Scepticism taught in schools. Demonstrate manipulation on kids and conclude that even educated, intelligent minds can get entangled when they let their guard down.
> We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that infected society, but we’re missing a key data point: polarization is a growth hack, and it works.
Unfortunately the article does not explain how it works and without a problem definition, you cant reach a solution. IMO it certainly behaves like a disease.
I consider identity politics as one vector how a mind virus can take over the hosts higher order reasoning. There are certainly other vectors (cognitive biases) but IP is definetly the biggest driving factor behind todays polarization. Calling others "liberals" is primarily a signal to label an outgroup.
On what political side do you see more symbols like flags, stickers, memes, etc? Entire news cycle narratives can get deprived of meaning and act as the most recent symbol, individuals can use to signal their group membership. Any counter argument against such a holy cow gets viciously attacked or ignored because to some degree, this counter argument is an actual attack on yourself, your identitiy. Admitting errors is no big deal when nothing is at stake. The opposite example would be a very religious person loosing faith with an adrenaline rush (sweat, shiver, high heart rate, flat respiration), when the body prepares a fight or flight response because a strong, non-ignorable and contradicting thought crossed its mind.
And on what political side do you see more intelligence and broader empathy? More cognitive flexibility?
Around 2000, the internet was considered a new "printing press 2.0" for making information widely accessible. This analogy fits very well, because the first ever western book to be printed was the f'ing bible.
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.
I'm reminded of a certain philosopher...
> A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.
> The real grift has been in echo chambers changing peoples vocabulary
Glad others are noticing this, it deserves more attention than it gets and everyone should be aware it's happening.
I'm genuinely interested in some concrete examples of "changing peoples vocabulary."
I'm not really in the loop, and I think I do a decent job of avoiding echo chambers.
https://news.fsu.edu/news/education-society/2025/08/26/on-sc...
Can you give an example or two of this conflicting vocabulary?
Cages. Evil. Literally. Extremism. Greedy. Exploited. Healthy. Offensive.
Sorry, but that word list isn't very helpful. Perhaps it's because I'm not embedded in your US context.
Can you put them into sentences, or give some context? How are they interpreted differently by different people?
one of the first steps in any color revolution is changing the language to confuse everyone, so it's not surprising that it's so common
Exactly correct on echo chambers. I say my opinion on something and I hear the exact same responses from pro people and the exact same responses from con people. Everyone hears it.
Repeating the same words someone else does to make yourn point makes me think the other person isn't capable of considering they might be wrong.
I disagree with saying "I can see both sides". That's another echo chamber. If I say I can reasonably see both sides of an issue, one side calls me an idiot and uneducated and suc h and the other goes straw man and how I'm a communist and/or Hitler. No. I can see why side A thinks the way they do and side B thinks the way they do.
I'm not talking about hot topics either.
I'm really starting to just want to get away from all society and/or just never have more than surface level conversations with people.
Being reasonable is basicaly the core requirement of civilization. If your culture is incapable of tolerance or variation it's also incapable of growth. It gets locked in a cyclical purity test and collapse.
Really should have mentioned algorithmic feeds too. They’re imo one of the biggest contributors to this.
Diversify your sources is a good start but without algos are a gravity well of sorts too - it pulls you into echo chambers - that are stronger than manual attempts to select diversity
This is a very interesting article.
I'm not 100% convinced every influencer _feels_ trapped in a world of their own making - but it's correct that truth this day is suffering a bit of a "tragedy of the commons" problem.
> The world will keep offering you bad trades, will keep rewarding positions you know are too simple to be true.
Here's a story. I'd guess there's at least a few HN folk with a similar tale.
I'm not a real believer in cryptocurrency, in its current popular form at least. Actual value would be delivered by fast transaction rates at (very) high speed, high assurance, and some kind of oversight or ability to reverse transactions (you can choose your cutoff anywhere from "convicted criminal behavior" to "I disputed a transaction on my Visa/Mastercard just because I could" but ultimately society and the law needs to be an effective backstop of the system). Yet I was introduced to the bitcoin paper sometime near its release by a PhD officemate, and was a specialist in high performance and GPU computing at the time, and resolved to go home and spend a few hours mining a coin, but instead I just chilled out when I got home. I could literally have hundreds of coins right now (or equivalent cash). For years I could have chosen to join the bandwagen, but resolved not to. Currently my parents are profiting - go figure.
So yeah the world offers some interesting trades from time to time!
In any case I found the article meaningful. I'm glad I live outside the US and its current polarization, but I feel we have the same problem growing here. Hopefully we all learn to deal with it and sort out our differences.
Switching a Japanese dumbphone (Kyocera) was the best thing I ever did. Eliminating your smartphone (as inconvenient and life altering as it may be -- you'll need to figure out a path) is probably the single most effective thing you can do to get into the top 1-10%... of people with properly functioning cognition.
Here is a program for avoiding insanity:
1) Always listen to your rational adversary, repeat their arguments back to them to their satisfaction rather than in caricature.
2) List facts; states of affairs that are not in dispute. Adduce no fact in isolation.
3) Form the strongest version of your rational counterparts' argument.
4) Apply reason faithfully to analyze.
5) Lather rinse repeat.
It seems the above is the best humans have every been able to do, it is child's play that we somehow forgot, maybe because we labelled it as something obscure like "the scientific method" or "legal process". I think this is as simple as "follow your nose".
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.
i found it weird that this person has multiple friends that were able to "make bank" by having polarizing opinions. i know a ton of folks with polarizing opinions and none of them are monetizing it.
what kind of world is this author living in where their social circle includes so many influencers that are cashing in on social media?
I assume it was the author ratting on themselves and their para social relationships. I'm guessing "friend" here is a person the author follows on Twitter and occasionally exchanges a DM with
And the influenced are rewarded by the influencer that is validating their polarized views.
You also might be putting too fine a point on "influencer". A relative of mine on Facebook might be a kind of "influencer"—at least with regard to his small cadre of family and friends that follow him.
You can look at it it this way, but why your small circle of family and friends would reward polarizing opinions? If anything, I have seen people losing real life relationships by not knowing when to stop in online arguments
That's for sure. Sure think a lot less of some members of my family and a coworker or two thanks to SM (can we just call it SM?).
>most people are not influencers.
Perhaps, but many are. They just don't have much reach or don't use a digital platform.
> but most people are not influencers.
they either get elected or appointment to the government
Nobody can vouch for their own sanity. Attempting to do so only make you sound insane. Incentives to be insane? Sure, but.... it is timing the stock market of ideas. Some will get rich but most will not. And sanity either has to return or insanity will destroy many lives and the society in which it is allowed free reign. In any case if you promoted insanity when sanity returns and people regain their ability to have a memory you may reap what you seeded.
> Nobody can vouch for their own sanity. Attempting to do so only make you sound insane.
Exactly, and if people deem you to be insane, you cannot do anything about that. They will find reasons for why what you are saying is out of your insanity. There is a great movie about a woman being held against her own will at the locked up psychiatric ward and it explores this.
Trying to talk reason to multiple sides makes you an outcast.
Lol case in point: me trying to have a reasonable discussion about property taxes going up 66% in one year.
I thought people might argue that this could put an unfair burden on poor families or fixed income families, or maybe some reason to justify or not.
Nope. Lots of name calling, trying to dox me, ad hominem attacks on everyone from multiple sides.
I'm convinced that anonymity (or, more correctly, perceived anonymity) makes some people act in ways they never would face to face.
Eh this probably makes me a "Boomer" but I've seen it for years. Basically everyone's a troll now.
I am 31 years old. Same experiences. You have to find the right audience. For me, it was particular IRC channels where they were still quite reasonable.
A lot of this goes away when you stop spending so much time on social media, which is a very poor reflection of "reality." Part of the problem is that there are a number of people who can't really look away, because they've built their livelihoods on it. Traditional media in many ways has come to rely on it too. Unfortunate mistake.
Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway. Just take a look at how the story around the Epstein files changes with the way the wind blows. It feels very familiar to the "Narcissist's Prayer."
> A lot of this goes away when you stop spending so much time on social media, which is a very poor reflection of "reality."
It mainly "too much time of political social media". You can always tell.
What you find is that a lot of people will be repeating talking points and/or catch phrases without putting much thought into it. A lot of this is fed to them by people who are essentially evangelists and many of these people I am convinced are given they talking points, because they all say the same thing at roughly the same time.
> Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway
They can do that if they are getting a decent turnover of new viewers. That doesn't work too well when their fanbase is declining.
If you look into the UFO land which is the worst for this and the most obvious because often the claims are ridiculous. What often happens is that someone will be outright exposed for being a fraud e.g. someone proves that a video was fake. They will then disappear for a few months or maybe a few years. During that time, many more new people would have filtered into the community and many won't look into that person's background.
I haven't used social media in over a decade and I change my mind all the time. Changing your mind is a good thing for a thinking being.
Social media figures aren't changing their mind in the same way, they are changing and optimizing their public performance.
Professional social media is a paid performance. We understand that Tom Cruise is not really a highly skilled jet fighter pilot but a well paid actor playing the role of one. No one cares what Tom Cruise thinks about Ukraine/Russia air defense tactics. This gets hidden in plain sight with social media though and why social media is hyper stupifying.
Right, it's not so much "changing minds" in that they probably aren't thinking about much very deeply... it's more like "changing to suit the popular narrative direction"
from the article.
> The returns on reasonableness have almost entirely collapsed
If you measure returns by others' approval, then you are doomed as the world is fickle. Unfortunately, as a writer or journalist you are forced to depend on approval of others.
The alternative is to sculpt a framework or scorecard largely independent of what others think - but this is hard, as we are social creatures.
> as a writer or journalist you are forced to depend on approval of others
and sometimes the disapproval of others, as we've seen with the sort of rage-baiting headlines many blogs, social media accounts, and even traditional media outlets, are writing
and the thing is... this approval/disapproval reaction isn't elicited to necessarily build coalitions, make friends, or change minds, it's often built to sell eyes-on-ads which is a completely perverse incentive that has eaten the mainstream internet
There is a large number of people that appreciate being told the truth. That model actually works better over the long term.
Grifting (which is what is often seen on social media platforms by many of the personalities) can give you large rewards quickly however you are always at risk at being found out. Once they are exposed, it is often usually over for them.
It's easier said than done. I simply observe everything and try not to react unless I absolutely need to.
This summer I started to write my thoughts an observations. Maybe you will find it helpful.
https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/the-middle-path-a-m...
I view social media through this lens now.
https://youtu.be/fuFlMtZmvY0?si=Jwtky2w0j41u4zLP
It's less that we are in echo chambers and more of being completly flooded with too many opinions.
Avacados == liberal Steaks == conservative
The point I take is that the only way to prevent this is decrease the amount of information you recieve not increase. If you constantly read extreme opinions everywhere your brain cannot process it and therefore starts dropping everything into really big buckets. The more sides you read the bigger your buckets becomes.
Sure you're less informed but I don't think humans were designed to grok the entire world's information either.
> You get certainty in an uncertain world. You get a community that will defend you. You get a simple heuristic for navigating complex issues.
This is what faith used to provide. I say this as a not religious person: Maybe societies really need something like religion to channel irrationality?
We've been trying religion for as long there have been humans. Tends to suffer from the same shortcomings: very easy to subvert and abuse by adversial agents (grifters, sociopaths, etc) and increases in-group/out-group thinking.
We need something new.
But the point is, that's the same happening right now without religion. At least, with organized religion, you have someone accountable.
Again, this come from someone without a religious affiliation.
The irony of an article that talks about beliefs being fed by internet content, then suggests using internet content to address it.
Turtles all the way down.
More succinctly:
The Nash equilibrium of public discourse on social media is extremism and polarization ...
... because for each individual, the way to get more clicks and influence is by becoming more extreme and polarizing.
Sigh.
Idk, I’m a big critic of social media (don’t use any but hacker news). Really do think it has lots and lots of problems.
But what’s polarized me isnt that. It’s just reading regular news and caring about the world.
Exactly, so about that, there's good news and bad news. Epistemic and mean field game theory is eventually going to be well understood stuff and define better alternatives very, very specifically. After we understand our past completely AND can predict our future, we'll know exactly what to fix and how, but unfortunately nothing whatsoever will change anyway. Probably someone will weaponize it to actually make things worse! Cold comfort to be sure, but I personally will still sleep easier after I know exactly why we are doomed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1-OmAICpU
We need 'unfluencers'.
The problem is that it would just be the same few message repeated ad nauseum:
- Treat it all like it's trying to sell you something
- Think for yourself
- Nothing is as simple as it seems
- One person does not represent an entire race/country/group (ie. anecdata is not truth)
etc.
As they say, however, a lie can travel the world twice before the truth has tied its shoe laces.
There is a critical problem with influencers: once they build a large audience, they often feel compelled to stick to the same message, even if they later realize it's wrong, because influence itself becomes a business and a source of power.
I think Unfluencers can be consistent because they're not taking a position.
But that also means it's unprofitable, so why do it?
Which, in itself, is an interesting commentary on Influencers.
I think disengaging from social media is a big part of this. These advertiser and engagement fueled algorithms promote all of the insane takes as well. You find much more fulfillment engaging with people locally or people in your close circles.
I’m not on social media unless you consider HN social media (I don’t) and the world is still totally as insane as it was before the internet.
For your average city person:
The food you’re offered is sugar + preservatives, the water is either non-existent (Tehran) or poisoned with fracking gas (Flint), almost all local communities have collapsed into extreme versions of themselves, the rich and poor still don’t mingle, men fear women and women want nothing to do with men, there is no upside to having a family or children.
I just spoke at a HBS event in DC last night about robotics and on one side of the room were people starting AI companion services and in the other side people were saying AI was causing the rise of Tradwives. It was like looking at 50 “deer in headlights” when explaining how thoroughly they have already integrated third party algorithmic logic into their decision processes - and are totally unaware of it.
The real world is absurd and getting less coherent with more information available. Humans aren’t biologically equipped for the world we collectively built.
Your disconnect from Social Media and "the world still totally insane"—the latter is of course not dependent on the former. Perhaps we need to get the rest of the world also off Social Media? Off the internet?
Given that we can't do that, I choose then to continue my hobbies, take more walks, try to declutter my place, improve my health, lose weight, look for comfortable chats with my daughters, wife, friends…
I'm not sure where you see men and women not trusting one another. If I had to guess it would be that you perceive this from things you have seen on the internet?
I find the internet is kind of like that silly cave in "The Empire Strikes Back"—where you find only what you bring with you. Try looking for positive things and people and see if you are not rewarded. (And if you cannot, just drop the internet completely. I have a friend that I think checks online for about 30 minutes in the morning and then he's done for the day.)
I have teenagers headed to college. I’m seeing it first/second hand.
Across high schools in the US kids aren’t dating like they used to and are vocal about not just ambivalence but hostility toward having kids.
Oddly enough my kids want to get married and have kids and report on how it’s odd to them others positions, so if anything I’m biased the other direction from exposure.
I don’t care either way, not having kids is a valid approach, but it’s a fact that there’s going to be societal impacts.
You think Tehran and Flint are good cases for 'average city'?
Yes
Both are significantly different but still fail to provide the most basic service: access to clean water
I can trivially get access to plenty of clean drinking water in most “wild” places in the world, in fact that’s like the third core thing you learn in survival schools (of which I’ve attended many).
You're doing the thing that the article is talking about. Neither are average examples. I don't know about Tehran, but you have to really be cherry-picking to make a data set where Flint ends up as an average case of municipal water quality.
No it’s demonstrating that at the relative extreme ends you have the same problem thus creating the linear equation with the minimum set
The reader should deduce that any measure along the same linear map - which is effectively every city aka the “average city” - will eventually be subject to this condition (water insecurity)
You can trivially verify this by looking at issues of water insecurity and water quality issues across every size city. Notice that you will have non-trivial numbers of “boil water” events in the United States south. You may have significant periods of drought throughout your average city in sub-Saharan Africa, Sonoran desert or western China for example.
I think maybe your definition of “average” only includes modern metropolitan areas and not simply as cities where people are geographically clustering across the globe.
I lived in San Angelo Texas in 2009 and I did not have potable water in my home. I had to go to Walmart and fill 5 gallon jugs of Culligan water every few days. That’s not particularly abnormal
To be fair I offered a fairly complex/compressed way to approach this, so not easily interpreted, but nonetheless that’s the point
Stoked you took a survival class though! I'm not being sarcastic, it sounds fun.
Man, I’d love to hear that talk.
> there is no upside to having a family or children
what exactly does this even mean?
Search: Gen Z explains why they don’t want a family and kids
All are rational arguments
https://youtu.be/fHpgIvuETx0?si=zWIqJvQMeDcSD223
I felt the same thing when i was 22--kids aren't for me, this world sucks, etc etc. Eventually I "grew up," toned down short term hedonistic pleasures, read books that deepened my connection to humanity and realized family is extremely meaningful.
First off, there's nothing new about interviewing people who are in their early 20s and hearing moaning and groaning about how this world sucks and it's not worth bringing anyone into it. I'm not religious whatsoever, but there's something deeply spiritual about the human experience of family/kids. It's certainly not for everyone if you're mature enough to understand the downsides and decide not to--but the secondary point I want to make is that I think most people are naive/immature. They follow trends and take a lot of direction from social media. The endless short term dopamine hits from every corner of your life will definitely have anybody questioning -- "why would i make my life harder when i can live only for myself and continue tiktoking in the evenings for 3 hours" -- our society is fundamentally broken, and that's not just the USA. I've traveled to other places and have bumped into the social media zombies everywhere.
> this world sucks and it's not worth bringing anyone into it
What exactly is wrong ("moaning and groaning", something that you "grew up" from), in your estimation, about that perspective?
> realized family is extremely meaningful
I believe that many people with the aforementioned perspective would agree with you, but would add that reducing further suffering is an overriding priority.
"Remember: the world only rewards insanity because we're measuring the wrong timeframe."
Unfortunatly for many, HR lives in that "wrong timeframe", so you keep your more sane opinions bottled up.
The challenge is that short-term incentives can easily lead to long-term problems, as the short-term min/maxing can leave you stuck in a particular global minimum, with no clear way out.
>the short-term min/maxing can leave you stuck in a particular global minimum, with no clear way out.
Short term min/maxing leaves you in a local maximum (the opposite of what you said)
Local maximum != global maximum (usually).
I said global minimum, which can easily happen if you end up at local maximum, but you’ll never know unless you randomly search elsewhere (and potentially end up even lower).
A local maximum by definition cannot be a global minimum. A local maximum has to be higher than things around it, which are part of the global space.
Fair point. However, the local maximum doesn’t have to be far from the global minimum.
If the global maximum is 10, minimum is 1, you could easily end up in a region with local maximum 2, minimum 1.
Arno Gruen the insanity of normality
The piece denies the existence of problems though.
It starts of with enragment and denailism.
The piece is the polarization.
"Diversify your information" in no way cancels single events and single counter examples.
The idea that ingesting more diversified information will bring back the lives of dead children and delete what people have done and said is ludicrous.
The problem is that a certain kind of "intellectual" does not understand how constantly pivoting or turning to statistical aggregates to avoid the discussion around a single intervention is basically a vector of attack on a system.
To stay sane, one must parse data. Literally attempt to gather data from the government. Literally take notes tracking the incoherence of the media narratives. But then you will find that merely describing reality is enough to trigger certain types of people now into frothing mania.
If you think you are intelligent you MUST realize that social media is going to do importance sampling on the things they find usefull to the business.
The defense against importance sampling is to abandon experiential aggregates entirely and focus on factless truths like incoherent, or single examplars that are enough to prove your point or raise a grievance.
Focus on counter-examples. Focus on definitti style incoherence. Live in the meta.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent. Another started treating political disagreement as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.
Uh.... The vast majority of new stories from major outlets ARE manufactured consent.
What does "manufactured consent" mean?
I thought consent is a synonym of agreement or willingness. If so, what do they mean with "manufactured agreement" exactly?
I don't live in USA and English is not my mother language, so maybe I'm missing some alternative urban definition for this expression?
I understand what you're saying. But people who use the expression "manufactured consent" know that it comes from Chomsky and use it in the same sense as Chomsky did. It refers to the idea that the only debate that the media allows is that which doesn't challenge any actual power. Furthermore that expression also refers to the fact that this is achieved without anyone having to explicitly coerse the media. The individuals in it self-select to support with the agenda. You're allowed to be a revolutionary, but no one in the media will give you a job because they're all benefiting from the status quo and don't want to rock and boat.
For example, the left media hypes the democrats and the right media hypes the republicans. You're encouraged to debate which is better, because it doesn't actually change anything. But if there's a candidate that says "corporations have too much power and are using to exploit labour", both sides of the media will attack them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Thanks! I didn't know that expression came from Chomsky, now it makes total sense.
This comments section is so full of examples illustrating what the OP is critiquing that it's depressing.
> 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.
No, moderatism or centrism is legitimately a fallacy. The idea or intuition that, given two endpoints, the most correct position is one in the middle, is a fallacy. It depends entirely on the endpoints.
For example: the three fifths compromise. Turns out, bad. The correct answer was emancipation all along, and the 'centrist' answer was just bad. Because, well, one of the endpoints was slavery. If you 'halfway' slavery, that's still bad. There's no merits or 'well what about's when it comes to slavery.
That doesn't mean centrists or moderates are wrong - they're often right. But it DOES mean that just taking a middle of the road approach isn't reasonable. You need to actually understand why you're doing that, and why the middle makes the most sense. In some parts of the world, right now, as in right now right now, the 'both sides' argument is pro-genocide. In the past it's been pro-slavery, pro-colonialism, pro-holocaust, whatever. Plenty of really bad stuff.
So, you can't hide behind 'both sides'. You need to justify WHY 'both sides' and why in the middle is best for this particular case.
So you just did a Mote and Bailey. The initial claim was that "anyone rejecting both extremes is automatically wrong"; I pointed out that this was a weaponized defense being used by both sides to hide their BS, and instead of responding to that, you refuted the similar sounding but unrelated claim (which hadn't been made) that "the truth is somewhere in the middle".
Saying that both sides are peddling absolute bollocks is not, in any way, a claim that we'd be better off with some sort of average of the two. Both sides are mostly full of it, full stop.
Uh, no, I was responding to the notion of 'both sides ism' which I called centrism or moderatism, which is, in fact, a fallacy.
That DOES NOT mean that both sides can't do X or Y, or that moderates are wrong. What it means is there is a particular kind of person who will hide behind middle-road nothing burger perspectives, because they intuitively believe middle of the road must be reasonable.
It's not guaranteed to be reasonable. That's the fallacy. I didn't say YOU did the fallacy, I'm just explaining what 'both sides ism' is.
Now, on to you, specifically:
> Both sides are mostly full of it, full stop.
This is a nothing burger perspective. It's not interesting, or thoughtful, or intellectual, and it's barely worth the bits it's encoded in.
Yes, politicians lie. And? So what? That doesn't tell anyone anything about, well, anything.
Also, when certain politicians are lying about certain things and you say 'well everyone lies!' - you are making it worse.
You can bet your fucking ass that the reason people like Trump are able to railroad your constitutional rights is because there's droves of useful idiots who will say 'well democrats do the same thing!'
Okay? But they're not doing it right now, right? And that little tidbit doesn't magically make everything okay, right? So what have we achieved? In our quest to find the right answer, we've just justified and defended behavior that we know is bad for us. That's just self destruction.
There are two fallacies being discussed here:
1) The fallacy that averaging two wrong answers will somehow magically give you the correct answer.
2) The fallacy that the opposite of a wrong answer must be correct.
People who point out that partisans are committing the second fallacy are routinely accused (as you are doing here) of committing the first. This is a weaponized strategy which (somewhat ironically) employed by "both sides".
It is quite possible for A to be wrong, the "political opposite" of A to be wrong, and their "political average" to also be wrong. The correct answer, if any is to be found, may well be hiding outside of the framing that "both sides" have agreed to use. But anyone trying to point this out will be accused (again, by "both sides") of engaging in "both side ism" because it threatens their shared hegemony.
It's a stupid rhetorical trick, and adding more faux anger and swear words to your response isn't going to make me fall for it.
OP's point is that you get accused of "both sides ism" even if you merely try to examine the claims of both sides on their merits, the cardinal sin being not rejecting them outright. I'm far left myself and I've seen it plenty of time; on the left it's usually presented as, "engaging with those ideas legitimizes them".
In my opinion, the problem is that journalists in general used “both sides” rhetoric where it wasn’t warranted to avoid accusations of bias. It feels that nuance is used out of cowardice more often than not.
There’s also the fact that not all positions are equally valid or evidence based. Nuance doesn’t mean treating each position as equally valid, but evaluating each on the evidence. Journalists almost uniformly mistake “both sides” for nuance. There’s nuance in discussions about global warming, but treating “global warming is not man made” as a valid position is not an example of that.
Nuance is definitely something we need more of, but we also need to call a spade a spade more often.
The boy who cried "there's a wolf on both sides!"
>A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.
I'm a long time Jon Stewart fan and if I'm being honest, looked at the "other side" as if it was a bunch of retarded people isn't new and predate 2016. No doubt Trump and social media got conservative to embrace condescending and extreme rhetoric and pushed it to another level but let's not pretend they invented anything.
I have a hard time taking this kind of enlightened-centrist both-sides gruel very seriously. Calling every strong position "extreme" is a classic sleight-of-hand maneuver by people who want to mask their own wrong-side-of-history beliefs that they know they should feel ashamed of expressing.
Yes, yes, look for truth beyond labeled groups, but pretending that the "sides" are equal is some utterly moronic "Fair and Balanced" bullshit.
> it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.
Many issues really do have a bright dividing line. I mean, for fuck's sake, there are people who are currently fighting against releasing the Epstein files, documents that clearly incriminate pedophilic rape and sex trafficking.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent.
I think the author here doesn't actually understand what manufactured consent is, because believing otherwise demonstrates media illiteracy. Talking about our extreme filter bubbles (community/information homogeneity) in one breath and then denying the pervasiveness of manufactured consent in the next is otherwise a perfect demonstration of Gell-Mann amnesia.
It isn’t “us vs them”. It’s just “us”.
Mainstream media and social media polarize the fuck out of us and make everything so fucking toxic and tribal. Snap out of it!
We are all just people trying to make our way in this world with imperfect information and no instruction manual.
"enlightened-centrist" and "both-sides(ism)" are phrases left-leaning people use to try and say "My team good, your team bad, to believe anything else is insanity/stupidity!" without coming off as a douchebag. (It doesn't work)
If you don't want to release the Epstein files, then yeah, you're bad.
If you're 'both side'-ing fucking pedophilia, take a step back and ask yourself - what the fuck are we doing here?
Sometimes people, and this includes republicans, are just pieces of shit. Sometimes someone is OBVIOUSLY wrong, and someone is OBVIOUSLY right. You are allowed to diverge from the fucking hivemind and say 'you know what, this republican sucks'.
Trump sucks man. He's a legitimately bad person and a stain on humanity. There is no alternative perspective to that. If you try to argue one, that's suspicious!
> If you don't want to release the Epstein files, then yeah, you're bad.
You can be against the Epstein files being released for numerous reasons that don't require supporting child abuse.
Here's an example:
"The files are likely inaccurate or manipulated and likely to be used for character assassination. I see numerous people on the left and right wings of the political spectrum accusing the other side of manipulating them."
That does not in any way support child abuse.
> If you're 'both side'-ing fucking pedophilia, take a step back and ask yourself - what the fuck are we doing here?
I'm unsure what you mean. This is a very emotional statement with little actual substance. If you're claiming that only Republicans participated in Epstein's child abuse ring, that doesn't seem to be true at all.
> Sometimes people, and this includes republicans, are just pieces of shit. Sometimes someone is OBVIOUSLY wrong, and someone is OBVIOUSLY right. You are allowed to diverge from the fucking hivemind and say 'you know what, this republican sucks'.
Nobody is objectively a piece of shit, nor is an opinion objectively wrong. Opposing the release of the Epstein files is not objectively or obviously wrong. What "hivemind" are you talking about? A large number of Americans hate Trump.
> Trump sucks man. He's a legitimately bad person and a stain on humanity. There is no alternative perspective to that. If you try to argue one, that's suspicious!
What do you mean, "there is no alternative perspective to that."? Are you saying that people arguing that Trump is not a stain on humanity don't hold a perspective on that matter?
This is a very angry, very Redditesque comment that is more emotional than it is logical.
What you perceive as 'Redditesque' is just a severe lack of conviction on your part. It's a kind of cowardice so powerful it can disguise itself as reasonableness.
Even when faced with villiany beyond belief, you cannot find the strength to condemn. Do you need see the poetic level of pathetic-ness in that?
You're allowed to just say 'these people suck'. Doing so doesn't make you anti-intellectual. You don't have to do backflips and contort your soul in unimaginable ways to defend people who do not deserve it.
> What do you mean, "there is no alternative perspective to that."? Are you saying that people arguing that Trump is not a stain on humanity don't hold a perspective on that matter?
Kind of, I'm saying their perspective is either not genuine or does not matter.
Right, again, when people are defending actual pedophiles, we have to take a step back.
Why are they doing it? It's probably not genuine. It's for political reasons. They probably know, deep down, that this is bad. They do. But they ignore their true feelings and argue the opposite, because they want to win in some political sense. They are cowards to their own beliefs.
Also, I never said objectively. I said obviously.
You can argue diddling kids is not objectively bad. Whatever. But it's certainly obviously bad, at least to the human beings I have met.
This is a common misconception about what it means to be against political extremes.
It does not mean "both sides have a point".
It does not mean "both sides" are equally bad.
It does not even mean that there are necessarily two sides.
The term "centrist" is used to imply and reinforce these misconceptions, encouraging people toward extremes. When you see things in black and white, of course everything is a straight line from good to evil (with you at the far end of good), so if someone only partially agrees with you, they're in the "center" and that much closer to Hitler than you. It's hard to step outside of this fantasy. But I'll try to help you.
Imagine the following dialogue.
A: "Are you Hindu or Muslim?"
B: "Neither. I'm an atheist."
A: "Oh, so you are torn between Vishnu and Muhammad."
And yes, one of the political parties is significantly more deranged than the other right now. You don't need to be extreme to see that and it is possible to vote for the more reasonable party without drinking their kool-aid.
[flagged]
> Transpeople are the people they say they are.
Let's just poke this one a little bit. Does this standard apply to all people or just trans people? Why or why not? Do you think this[1] individual is who they say they are? Why or why not?
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-extremist-trans-neo-nazi-gende...
> Does this standard apply to all people or just trans people?
All.
> Why or why not?
Because the self as a concept only exists within the mind of the individual and it's sole source for determination is what that individual says. It's non-falsifiable so taking people at their word is simply the only option.
> Do you think this[1] individual is who they say they are?
Sure. There are shitty transpeople too.
> Why or why not?
See above.
And if you're asking how you prevent that person from being a threat to other people in the prison, well, there's a lot to unpack there.
For immediate solutions, solitary confinement. I don't like it as a policy but the neo-nazi movement is openly male-supremacist and this person, woman or not, is a threat to other women. If she wants to be sent to a women's prison it's the prison's duty to see that incarceration pass with as few incidents as possible, so the only logical path forward is isolation from other inmates.
For broader solutions: the fact that we segregate prisons along sex lines is going to always be a problem for trans offenders, but I also understand why that segregation exists and it's obvious. If we assume those same risks are valid, then any transwoman in a woman's prison is a threat, and any transmasculine person in a men's prison is threatened, and nonbinary folk are going to be all kinds of lost in that system. So, logically, we should expand the range of available prison facilities to account for this. Transwomen would go to a transwoman's prison, which would be identical to a woman's prison, apart from not having ciswomen in it, and vice-versa. And I guess you'd also need enby-jails too.
Though if you want my personal opinion, I think there's a much easier solution to this particular offender, and it's the same solution I'd prescribe for any Nazi, regardless of their gender identity.
> All.
Ok, so then transracial individuals[1] should be believed as well? What about those that identify as inanimate objects[2] or animals? If we accept self-identification as an inanimate object should others be allowed to treat that person as such?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/swjdjp/tree...
> Ok, so then transracial individuals[1] should be believed as well?
I mean, "race" is a social construct too. There's nothing biologically different about a black man from a white man. It's a collection of cultural, historical and visual cues society imbues with meaning. So... in a way, it's got a lot in common with gender.
> What about those that identify as inanimate objects[2] or animals?
Yep.
> If we accept self-identification as an inanimate object should others be allowed to treat that person as such?
If someone earnestly identifies as an object, that's their prerogative. But no, others don't get to treat them like furniture or property because consent and dignity still apply to them. Identity doesn't override someone's right to safety, and it doesn't give others license to dehumanize, even in a twisted manner of affirming them.
And, as someone with an occasional spirit for some BDSM play, I am familiar with treating people like objects in a way that is edifying without being harmful to them.
Edit: It feels like you're trying really hard to find an edge case in self identification where it could be used to cause harm, as though the actual, current mechanisms of identity as imposed by society aren't also doing that. Yes, someone could use self identification to do something shitty. That is not unique to this concept and in fact this, and a variety of others, already have plenty of holes wide enough to drive a truck through to accomplish the same goal.
If your standard here is a system which is objectively verifiable, you will not meet it at any point. All of this is subjective because it all ties into the subjective experiences of individuals and the subjective analysis of systems and other individuals. There are no clear cut answers and there never will be, it's subjective turtles all the way down.
Who is the arbitrator of what’s right?
No VPN allowed, why?
The author might want to admit that 'moderate reasonable' positions are also branded and incentivized, and can lead to lucrative jobs in the corporate media and think tank worlds and even in the social media influencer space.
What really smells bad here is the 'stupid and insane' theme - everyone who disagrees with my moderate position is living in stupid-world or lacks sanity is itself an extremist fundamentalist position held by many so-called centrists and institutional bureaucrats whose impartiality is questionable as they are economic beneficiaries of the status quo.
Relatedly, extremist positions arise from extreme conditions - a well-paid experienced factory employee who loses their job due to the corporation outsourcing manufacturing to India will likely adopt an extreme position of opposition to shareholder or venture capital control of corporate decisions, and start advocating for worker control of corporations. Does that make them stupid and insane? Or is that just the spin the shareholders and venture capitalists are trying to put on their reasonable moderate position about sharing wealth and power in a more democratic fashion?
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.
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.
I'm so sick and tired of reading AI slop.
> The friend who saw conspiracies everywhere built a following. Then an audience. Then a 7-figure income stream.
That person is almost certainly a grifter. If I was dishonest enough to do it, I would to.
It isn't that difficult if you are reasonably articulate, look reasonably tidy and can upload a 20 minute video once day to get an audience. A lot of these people are simply choosing a "side" and then repeating the talking points.
There are people that make 10-20k a month just reading the news and many of them aren't even good at doing that.
The sheep-people were suddenly given freedom of choice, and they immediately rushed to choose their own shepherd. This is where the enormous amount of trust in cheaftans, national leaders, and other autocrats came from. This explains the outbreak of fascism and the cult of force.
Previously, parasites on society had to compete for resources among themselves. Now they can draw them directly. In other words, the existing system of "checks and balances" has collapsed, and there is no new one yet.
If all your relationships fail in the same manner, it is likely that the problem is you.
> One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent. Another started treating political disagreement as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.
Manufactured consent is a real thing, with mounting evidence that it's becoming increasingly prevalent. The ownership structures around major news outlets are worrisome and what many considered 'reliable' for years are now showing seriously problematic habits (like genocide erasure - lookin' at you, NYT.)
Liberalism has come under completely valid scrutiny as we've seen fiscal policies implemented by Clinton and Obama blow up in our faces. No, we don't think Reaganomics is anything but a grift, but many of us see the grift in NAFTA and the ACA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley and have begun to question the honesty of centrist liberal economic policies because we are seeing them fail catastrophically.
> The incentive gradient was clear: sanity was expensive, and extremism paid dividends.
Author is doing something subtle here - without making a defense or interrogation of the statement, they are saying "Not being liberal / centrist is extremism, and thus invalid". I call bullshit.
I have not profited or benefited from my "extreme" leftist views. If anything, I take a risk every time I talk about them out in the open. My comment history is going to be visible to all future employers. Should the government continue it's rightward slide I'll have a target painted on my back that I put there. I don't believe the things I believe because it's convenient, I believe them because in my estimation, we are operating on a set of failed systems and it's important that we fix them because they present a real and present danger.
We have Trump because Biden was utterly incapable of facing the actual problems people are having with the economic prosperity gap. If you don't address the actual hardship in people's lives, you leave the door open for a huckster to make those promises for you. Most will take the unreliable promise of a better tomorrow over being lied to about whether they even have a problem. You don't need a PhD in economics to know that whatever the GDP might be you're still broke and you can't afford to feed your kids.
Totally agreed with all points. Thanks for writing it up so elegantly
Breaking people raises the GDP. It wasn't that Biden was incapable, I mean besides the dementia his party and the media hid from its viewers, he was capable of fixing the problem for the less than billionaires.
The problem is believing the other party has an alternative. The problem is belief in the other. Who we believe the other is.
The other isn't anyone who doesn't have power over you. The problem is believing people who say someone who doesn't have power over you is the other.
There is only the powerless and the powerful.
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Really nothing in the article implied that whatsoever? It's not even about that if you actively try to read between the lines. Like--"liberal as a slur" is just a daily experience of american life these days, irrespective of the details of any of your personal relationships.
> a daily experience of american life
You people call you 'liberal as a slur' in real life out in the world?
Regardless, projecting your narrow experiences onto 'american life' writ large is not a sound starting point for any conversation.
It is the pairing of the term 'manufacturing consent' with "'liberal' as a slur" (from the left, not right) that evokes the genocide.
One of the primary consents manufactured in the Biden years was for exactly that.
Likewise for calls to eternal slow-walked 'nuance', instead of straightforward calls for ending the gifting of weapons to the belligerent, as has been done in living memory.
There's no 'conspiracy' (per the author) at all, Biden officials are already writing memoirs about it.
> You people call you 'liberal as a slur' in real life out in the world?
I see it online... everyday? Especially if I go back to the places I used to enjoy but have had to learn to avoid. And yes, anytime I interact with friends' parents, people in my hometown, etc, it's pretty ubiquitously used as a slur. Occasionally ironically since we're a few years past peak mind-virus (I'd like to think), but, yes, all the time.
I think they were listing two unassociated examples of the "people getting radical and weird" phenomenon in that list, not pairing them. I took "manufactured consent" as referring to the Trumpish "mainstream media is all lies" stance. Seems like you invented the israel connection out of thin air. Maybe you know something about the author, but, it wasn't in the article.
Likely not to their face, but I’ve absolutely had tons of people use it when talking to me as a slur for other people. Because they assumed I was like minded.
It’s absolutely used as a slur in conversation, yes.
I mean you have the Republican President of the United States publicly calling Democrats evil. People like to pretend their party (Democrats and Republicans alike) generally adheres to decency and decorum even though they demonstrably do not, but it’s especially rich for Republicans to act like they’re the party of decency in politics when they’re falling in lockstep with Donald Trump
Exactly this. Disengaging from the injustices ongoing in this world will likely benefit your mental health but it's a choice and we don't need your essays justifying that choice, and you trying to convince yourself that it makes you smarter than everyone else.
The article is an indictment on hackernews itself. I'm sure that won't be well received here, because of what the article says, specifically: "Start by diversifying your information diet in ways that feel actively uncomfortable."
There is almost no diversity of thought here, simply due to the algorithm. The basis of acceptance is agreeing with the main ideology here.
When the algorithm of the platform is to banish those who disagree, tribal unity is the outcome.
The algorithm doesn't allow disagreement. The algorithm is wrong and part of the algorithm is to disallow commenting on the algorithm.
> 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.