WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID

[anon_6hv78pr714xta]

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

It’s not just a phase.

www.theatlantic.com

I haven't read it yet, but Haidt is always worth reading. I'll post a summary later for the people too lazy to read. Have to finish Better Call Saul S6, E3.

 

[IUCrazy2]

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

It’s not just a phase.

www.theatlantic.com

I haven't read it yet, but Haidt is always worth reading. I'll post a summary later for the people too lazy to read. Have to finish Better Call Saul S6, E3.

Decent read and mostly over the target (although I think he falls into the trap that most people do when it comes to describing the ills of "my" side vs the ills of "their" side).

I think he is spot on in the politicalization of everything and how that has eroded faith in institutions. I think he has a major blind spot in that analysis but he at least correctly identifies the issue. Most of our problems involve an erosion in the faith in our institutions and in the intentions of our political rivals.

Social media is a bullhorn into everyone's mind and many of us use it to do things we never used to do to each other face to face.

 

[iuwclurker]

An important marker of the validity of a theory is the breadth and depth and quantity of data it explains. As just one example this analysis explains the political dominance of the far left with its cancel culture and so on and the far right with its authoritarian bent and so on. In other words, it explains and distinguishes. And covers many other facets of American life related to us getting systemically stupider. Although many of these facets are already commonly discussed, here he argues social media platforms have triggered and enabled the factors leading to a systemic increase in our stupidity.

For me the scariest is the lockstep intolerance of dissenting opinion in our academic and other predominantly liberal institutions. Our universities are arguably the United States’ most powerful and most dominant asset.

 

[MyTeamIsOnTheFloor]

Too many words.

Here’s why:

Social media tricked stupid, weak-minded idiots into thinking their opinion mattered, because you can’t punch a post in the face.

 

[iuwclurker]

Decent read and mostly over the target (although I think he falls into the trap that most people do when it comes to describing the ills of "my" side vs the ills of "their" side).

I think he is spot on in the politicalization of everything and how that has eroded faith in institutions. I think he has a major blind spot in that analysis but he at least correctly identifies the issue. Most of our problems involve an erosion in the faith in our institutions and in the intentions of our political rivals.

Social media is a bullhorn into everyone's mind and many of us use it to do things we never used to do to each other face to face.

Shorter Crazy: Where he applies his theory to the far left he’s correct, where he applies to the far right he’s wrong.

 

[IUCrazy2]

Shorter Crazy: Where he applies his theory to the far left he’s correct, where he applies to the far right he’s wrong.

Nope, he got stuff right on both sides. Quite a bit in fact. However, he failed to make certain connections in logic because he has a blind spot for team left.

 

[Univee2]

Decent read and mostly over the target (although I think he falls into the trap that most people do when it comes to describing the ills of "my" side vs the ills of "their" side).

I think he is spot on in the politicalization of everything and how that has eroded faith in institutions. I think he has a major blind spot in that analysis but he at least correctly identifies the issue. Most of our problems involve an erosion in the faith in our institutions and in the intentions of our political rivals.

Social media is a bullhorn into everyone's mind and many of us use it to do things we never used to do to each other face to face.

It was/is a good, though long, read. I do think he was pretty fair, however. The “dart-throwing” was spot on.

I thought his “solutions“ were a little simplistic, but I do agree with a point made at the end, about children and social media. I don’t know how in the hell you’d ever keep anyone off until they are 16, but what a test that would be if it could be tried. As part of that, encouraging unrestricted play has a lot of appeal wrt forming more well-rounded people. I had never heard of “free range parenting laws” until this but I guess we have all heard of parents being charged with neglect or something for letting their 8-9 year olds play in a park without parental guidance. I see younger parents on our 16-house street/cul de sac walk their kids a short distance to a bus stop and then wait until the bus comes. They wait at the stop when the kids return. What’s the concern? The stop is at the intersection with a non-major road, but there are cars coming by pretty regularly, so an abduction is highly unlikely. Our kids started going down to the stop - alone - when they were in first grade. The Kid Down the Hall had one year, when his sister had moved on to middle school and a different bus time, when he had to get there on his own, after locking up, as we had already left for our respective jobs. We’d probably be arrested and in Leavenworth if we tried that under today’s idiocy.

 

[iuwclurker]

Nope, he got stuff right on both sides. Quite a bit in fact. However, he failed to make certain connections in logic because he has a blind spot for team left.

Well...please elaborate.

 

[iuwclurker]

“But when an institution punishes internal dissent, it shoots darts into its own brain.

The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values. The “Hidden Tribes” study tells us that the “devoted conservatives” score highest on beliefs related to authoritarianism. They share a narrative in which America is eternally under threat from enemies outside and subversives within; they see life as a battle between patriots and traitors. According to the political scientist Karen Stenner, whose work the “Hidden Tribes” study drew upon, they are psychologically different from the larger group of “traditional conservatives” (19 percent of the population), who emphasize order, decorum, and slow rather than radical change.”

“The Democrats have also been hit hard by structural stupidity, though in a different way. In the Democratic Party, the struggle between the progressive wing and the more moderate factions is open and ongoing, and often the moderates win. The problem is that the left controls the commanding heights of the culture: universities, news organizations, Hollywood, art museums, advertising, much of Silicon Valley, and the teachers’ unions and teaching colleges that shape K–12 education. And in many of those institutions, dissent has been stifled: When everyone was issued a dart gun in the early 2010s, many left-leaning institutions began shooting themselves in the brain. And unfortunately, those were the brains that inform, instruct, and entertain most of the country.”

 

[iuwclurker]

I thought his “solutions“ were a little simplistic,

(sigh)

“What changes are needed? Redesigning democracy for the digital age is far beyond my abilities, but I can suggest three categories of reforms––three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era.”

 

[Univee2]

Too many words.

Here’s why:

Social media tricked stupid, weak-minded idiots into thinking their opinion mattered, because you can’t punch a post in the face.

I smite thee, old Cardinals fan.

 

[IUCrazy2]

Well...please elaborate.

Respectfully, no. For one thing, it is a pain in the ass for me to go and try to pull quotes on a phone. Secondly, that piece is long as hell, I am not going back through it to find the pieces where, as I was reading, I thought, "man you really sold the significance of that short or you overstate the significance of that." Finally, for the sake of the discussion, does it really matter if I thought he wasn't 100% spot on?

 

[TheOriginalHappyGoat]

Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

It’s not just a phase.

www.theatlantic.com

I haven't read it yet, but Haidt is always worth reading. I'll post a summary later for the people too lazy to read. Have to finish Better Call Saul S6, E3.

Good article, although a bit long. I thought it did a good job of describing the problem in detail, and Haidt's conclusion that the future is bleak hits with weight.

 

[anon_mlxxvlbug9dpa]

Good article, although a bit long. I thought it did a good job of describing the problem in detail, and Haidt's conclusion that the future is bleak hits with weight.

I’d be all for eliminating social media if we’d be able to trust our news overlords. But that ain’t happening any time soon.

 

[Marvin the Martian]

I’d be all for eliminating social media if we’d be able to trust our news overlords. But that ain’t happening any time soon.

We need enough people to cancel it, just stop consuming social media. But we as a people are addicted.

 

[larsIU]

Great article. I'm on Zillow now looking for cabin's in heavily wooded areas with no neighbors within 10 miles.

Now, however, artificial intelligence is close to enabling the limitless spread of highly believable disinformation. The AI program GPT-3 is already so good that you can give it a topic and a tone and it will spit out as many essays as you like, typically with perfect grammar and a surprising level of coherence. In a year or two, when the program is upgraded to GPT-4, it will become far more capable. In a 2020 essay titled “The Supply of Disinformation Will Soon Be Infinite,” Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, explained that spreading falsehoods—whether through text, images, or deep-fake videos—will quickly become inconceivably easy. (She co-wrote the essay with GPT-3.)

American factions won’t be the only ones using AI and social media to generate attack content; our adversaries will too. In a haunting 2018 essay titled “The Digital Maginot Line,” DiResta described the state of affairs bluntly. “We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality,” she wrote. The Soviets used to have to send over agents or cultivate Americans willing to do their bidding. But social media made it cheap and easy for Russia’s Internet Research Agency to invent fake events or distort real ones to stoke rage on both the left and the right, often over race. Later research showed that an intensive campaign began on Twitter in 2013 but soon spread to Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, among other platforms. One of the major goals was to polarize the American public and spread distrust—to split us apart at the exact weak point that Madison had identified.

We're doomed.

 

[anon_6hv78pr714xta]

We need enough people to cancel it, just stop consuming social media. But we as a people are addicted.

That's never going to happen. Might as well dream about colonizing Venus.

 

[Marvin the Martian]

That's never going to happen. Might as well dream about colonizing Venus.

I don't disagree, hence why I mentioned the worldwide addiction. But I don't think the government has the right to shut down social media. So our options are exceedingly limited.