5 ms·

In a post-truth world, this might make the treatments MORE popular. :-/

astrodust 10y ago
Is it just me or is misinformation some sort of virus that slowly spreads? I've noticed a sharp uptick in people utterly detached from reality lately where presumably the former checks to keep people grounded, like a critical news ecosystem, or a robust education system, has imploded.
- MandieD 10y ago
  You're not the only one - I've had this sense of a slow, but inescapably-accelerating epidemic for awhile now. Tuesday before last was not a shock. It feels like we're slowly falling off the trajectory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; avoiding fatalism about that is my main challenge right now.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Two driving factors, I think: dominance of the advertising industry, and a rise of "wicked problems" with no good comfortable answers. Global warming leads this: would you rather believe we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?
    - bduerst 10y ago
      Take a step further: Human attention has become a currency more than ever before, and pandering to human biases is one way media companies have learned to earn that currency. You used to need substantial capital to earn the reputation as a serious news organization, but now the barrier to entry is a vaguely-authoritative domain name and social media accounts.
    - VLM 10y ago
      Close. I'm not saying you're wrong but I am proposing a fork from your post in that the really important question isn't "would you rather believe we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?"\ But for the people in charge its more like: "would you gain more authoritarian political power by promoting that we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?" Now lets add another wrinkle... lets say by the magic of groupthink 99% of one population is already a devout member of one belief system. If 50% of climate scientists (small group though they are) were dyed in the wool Republicans then coming out against them would cost votes prestige and power. But if they already are indoctrinated to hate you and your race and your religion and your group, you don't lose very much in a practical sense by signalling against them. In fact as a member of the opposition you probably should oppose them on general principles and your own group expects you to live up to your ... devoutness. I've seen it, watching people nearby me convert to denialism. I have to admit I agree with them on a lot of smaller details. A fascination with symbolic level commitments that are a rounding error WRT altering the Earth's long term problems but ruin innumerably human lives in the short term. "This symbolic proposal will help absolutely nothing in the long term, but in the short term it'll sure destroy a lot of jobs, jobs for people that our political group are trained to bitterly hate..."
  - VLM 10y ago
    Ideas or memes buzz around like molecules in the air. If their average thermalized velocity exceeds gravitational escape velocity they gradually buzz away and no longer have any interaction with the Earth. Thats why hydrogen and helium are extremely common in the universe as a whole but there's not that much in our atmosphere. At least thats the astronomical analogy. If you atomize a culture and isolate and encourage subgroups to isolate and "other" each other, sort of divide and conqueror strategy on steroids, then you can end up with unconstrained groups that split into completely different cultures. Just like you take a population of one species, isolate two groups, and in evolutionary time (100K years?) you get two species that no longer care much about each other, might even eat each other. The Amish no longer have much if any common ground with the most extreme college SJWs. I'm not sure the SJWs have anything in common with the vast majority of the country, frankly. They've achieved escape velocity and will only wander further and further from the main culture and cluster of other cultures, like every other group thats achieved escape velocity from the main culture. Eventually interactions between people who are both foreigners in their own land will get really weird. Think of muslims with guns at FL nightclubs or with pressure cookers at marathons, my point isn't to be anti-muslim but to point out theres not much common ground anymore when the primary mode of interaction has declined to the level that it involves bloodshed. Once a group achieves cultural escape velocity, woosh, they're no longer part of the conversation, its us vs them yelling time at the best and kaboom bang bang time at worst. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and its not hard to absolute power in the form of political consensus in legacy mass media, academia, hollywood, SV. And with that absolute power comes corruption. Telling the truth becomes an act of disbelief or apostasy, or you can faithfully believe while knowingly lie. Its not just the left, in that any group thats 99% composed of one political group tends to fester and get smelly, there's plenty of this on the right. You can only gain power by a public display of ever more devout true believer statements, truth is gone out the window. Ask yourself if people gain power in academia or the legacy media by telling the truth or by loudly proclaiming their devotion to the political causes that 99% of them share... that's what post-truth world means. A healthy balanced competition would force the truth to make an occasional appearance, but in a polarized consensus of groupthink its just a legacy fable. Remember when that stuff was about the truth? Yeah not so much anymore. Combine the two ideas above and its a real mess. Atomized individuals and groups are broken off into groupthink hubs that rapidly share no common ground or affection with any other group and their interactions are based on gaining internal strength by showing their devout belief by denigrating the opposition. Traditionally this leads to revolution and civil war. I'd be surprised if the 50 states are together much longer. Frankly I can't wait, as the younger I am the better I'll come out in the rebuilding, assuming I survive. I'd rather rebuild at age 50 than age 70, for example.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    Exactly. The challenge now is to predict whether society in 50 years is going to look more like "Idiocracy" or "The Walking Dead". Either way, I don't foresee a good future for the human race. Hopefully, in some parallel universe, humans have avoided this fate, and are continuing the trajectory of the Enlightenment, and will proceed to exploring the stars, going where no one has gone before.
    - astrodust 10y ago
      Idiocracy is when the stupid prevail. The apocalypse is when only the lucky, tenacious and smart survive. I'm not sure which is worse.
    - x2398dh1 10y ago
      But that proposition, which is that the world will necessarily become a worse to a hyperbolic degree, is also misinformation. You can't, "predict" a future society 50 years from now with that level of precision.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  Internet penetration and social media use. Most of the population using the internet has happened in the last 20 years and social media exploded in the last 10 (in 2005, Myspace had less than 100 million users worldwide).
- jbpetersen 10y ago
  I think the exploding level of absurdity in what is true is also making it extremely hard for people to accurately tell what isn't. I can't wait to see all the conspiracy theories that pop up around self-driving cars.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Give it time. The Tesla conspiracy theories will swirl. ELON MUSK DIDN'T GO TO MARS, WAS ALL TO DODGE TAXES.
- ta_donk_gt 10y ago
  This is a natural result of hyper-partisanship, which is a natural result of groups separating into their preferred echo chambers, which is a natural result of it being easy to move to said echo chambers, which is a natural result of the internet. In these hyper-partisan environments, everyone is afraid to tell the whole truth because Team A might use pieces of Team B's statements against them (see the sibling comments about feminism and global warming, or anything around the current election, but any and every partisan topic applies). So what happens is people choose tidbits of truth that fully support their side's claims and ignore the rest of truth, and make sure everyone on their team follows suit. These tidbits of truth then get used in broader contexts and somehow become universal truths. These now universal truths are not questioned in one's own echo chamber because it would work against their shared goals. Team B then admonishes Team A within the Team B echo chamber because of the obvious ignorance of reality of the truth tidbits that became universal truths. The (not so) funny thing is that Team B is completely unaware that they do exactly the same thing. So, inside the Team A echo chamber all you hear is how the other side is completely ignorant of reality, suppresses the truth, ignores facts, outright lies and deceives, while our team is where the logic and reason exist. And the exact same thing is happening in the Team B echo chamber. Both teams are equally fervent about their superiority over the other team. And both sides have the same answer to the problem: get rid of the other team's echo chambers and everything will be fine. The actual truth cannot exist in this kind of environment.
- zelias 10y ago
  "These violent delights have violent ends"
- empath75 10y ago
  Brains never evolved to present reality to its owner. It's there to help you survive. You're totally free to build up an internal world view that only has the most tenuous attachment to reality, as long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to make a living and have kids (in an evolutionary sense). When reality becomes inconvenient to people, they'll happily ignore it and do whatever it takes to get by. As long as they're not ignoring something that's going to imminently harm them, they can get away with it for a long, long time, especially when they can find a community that reinforces it. You also never know what people actually believe, in their heart of hearts, and they may be professing nonsense so they can signal that their in some group, or because it's what they think you should believe, or what you they think that you want them to believe, etc.
pyre 10y ago
In a world where special interests all vie for the ability to manipulate the "accepted truth," we have those same special interests to thank for people's lack of trust in the system.
- NetStrikeForce 10y ago
  Of course propaganda works. Water is wet and all that. The problem is a worrying lack of critical thinking.
  - cookiecaper 10y ago
    Propaganda wouldn't work if people at large were able to think critically enough to counteract it. Most people implicitly trust whatever they've come to believe is authoritative. It's much more likely that someone will reject a truth from an untrusted source than an untruth, even a clear untruth, from a trusted source. This is always true at some level. There is so much data on everything that all of it cannot be considered and independently evaluated by each person; at some point you have to believe that someone else who knows more about this than you do has verified the claims.
bduerst 10y ago
I keep seeing this "post-truth world" [1] term - where did the term get coined? [1] http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/teach-philosophy-to-heal-our-post-truth-society-says-president-higgins-1.2875247 http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/teach-philosophy-to...

Is it just me or is misinformation some sort of virus that slowly spreads? I've noticed a sharp uptick in people utterly detached from reality lately where presumably the former checks to keep people grounded, like a critical news ecosystem, or a robust education system, has imploded.

MandieD 10y ago
You're not the only one - I've had this sense of a slow, but inescapably-accelerating epidemic for awhile now. Tuesday before last was not a shock. It feels like we're slowly falling off the trajectory of the Renaissance and Enlightenment; avoiding fatalism about that is my main challenge right now.
- pjc50 10y ago
  Two driving factors, I think: dominance of the advertising industry, and a rise of "wicked problems" with no good comfortable answers. Global warming leads this: would you rather believe we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?
  - bduerst 10y ago
    Take a step further: Human attention has become a currency more than ever before, and pandering to human biases is one way media companies have learned to earn that currency. You used to need substantial capital to earn the reputation as a serious news organization, but now the barrier to entry is a vaguely-authoritative domain name and social media accounts.
  - VLM 10y ago
    Close. I'm not saying you're wrong but I am proposing a fork from your post in that the really important question isn't "would you rather believe we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?"\ But for the people in charge its more like: "would you gain more authoritarian political power by promoting that we're on an inevitable path to doom, or that everyone is lying to you?" Now lets add another wrinkle... lets say by the magic of groupthink 99% of one population is already a devout member of one belief system. If 50% of climate scientists (small group though they are) were dyed in the wool Republicans then coming out against them would cost votes prestige and power. But if they already are indoctrinated to hate you and your race and your religion and your group, you don't lose very much in a practical sense by signalling against them. In fact as a member of the opposition you probably should oppose them on general principles and your own group expects you to live up to your ... devoutness. I've seen it, watching people nearby me convert to denialism. I have to admit I agree with them on a lot of smaller details. A fascination with symbolic level commitments that are a rounding error WRT altering the Earth's long term problems but ruin innumerably human lives in the short term. "This symbolic proposal will help absolutely nothing in the long term, but in the short term it'll sure destroy a lot of jobs, jobs for people that our political group are trained to bitterly hate..."
- VLM 10y ago
  Ideas or memes buzz around like molecules in the air. If their average thermalized velocity exceeds gravitational escape velocity they gradually buzz away and no longer have any interaction with the Earth. Thats why hydrogen and helium are extremely common in the universe as a whole but there's not that much in our atmosphere. At least thats the astronomical analogy. If you atomize a culture and isolate and encourage subgroups to isolate and "other" each other, sort of divide and conqueror strategy on steroids, then you can end up with unconstrained groups that split into completely different cultures. Just like you take a population of one species, isolate two groups, and in evolutionary time (100K years?) you get two species that no longer care much about each other, might even eat each other. The Amish no longer have much if any common ground with the most extreme college SJWs. I'm not sure the SJWs have anything in common with the vast majority of the country, frankly. They've achieved escape velocity and will only wander further and further from the main culture and cluster of other cultures, like every other group thats achieved escape velocity from the main culture. Eventually interactions between people who are both foreigners in their own land will get really weird. Think of muslims with guns at FL nightclubs or with pressure cookers at marathons, my point isn't to be anti-muslim but to point out theres not much common ground anymore when the primary mode of interaction has declined to the level that it involves bloodshed. Once a group achieves cultural escape velocity, woosh, they're no longer part of the conversation, its us vs them yelling time at the best and kaboom bang bang time at worst. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and its not hard to absolute power in the form of political consensus in legacy mass media, academia, hollywood, SV. And with that absolute power comes corruption. Telling the truth becomes an act of disbelief or apostasy, or you can faithfully believe while knowingly lie. Its not just the left, in that any group thats 99% composed of one political group tends to fester and get smelly, there's plenty of this on the right. You can only gain power by a public display of ever more devout true believer statements, truth is gone out the window. Ask yourself if people gain power in academia or the legacy media by telling the truth or by loudly proclaiming their devotion to the political causes that 99% of them share... that's what post-truth world means. A healthy balanced competition would force the truth to make an occasional appearance, but in a polarized consensus of groupthink its just a legacy fable. Remember when that stuff was about the truth? Yeah not so much anymore. Combine the two ideas above and its a real mess. Atomized individuals and groups are broken off into groupthink hubs that rapidly share no common ground or affection with any other group and their interactions are based on gaining internal strength by showing their devout belief by denigrating the opposition. Traditionally this leads to revolution and civil war. I'd be surprised if the 50 states are together much longer. Frankly I can't wait, as the younger I am the better I'll come out in the rebuilding, assuming I survive. I'd rather rebuild at age 50 than age 70, for example.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  Exactly. The challenge now is to predict whether society in 50 years is going to look more like "Idiocracy" or "The Walking Dead". Either way, I don't foresee a good future for the human race. Hopefully, in some parallel universe, humans have avoided this fate, and are continuing the trajectory of the Enlightenment, and will proceed to exploring the stars, going where no one has gone before.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Idiocracy is when the stupid prevail. The apocalypse is when only the lucky, tenacious and smart survive. I'm not sure which is worse.
  - x2398dh1 10y ago
    But that proposition, which is that the world will necessarily become a worse to a hyperbolic degree, is also misinformation. You can't, "predict" a future society 50 years from now with that level of precision.
maxerickson 10y ago
Internet penetration and social media use. Most of the population using the internet has happened in the last 20 years and social media exploded in the last 10 (in 2005, Myspace had less than 100 million users worldwide).
jbpetersen 10y ago
I think the exploding level of absurdity in what is true is also making it extremely hard for people to accurately tell what isn't. I can't wait to see all the conspiracy theories that pop up around self-driving cars.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Give it time. The Tesla conspiracy theories will swirl. ELON MUSK DIDN'T GO TO MARS, WAS ALL TO DODGE TAXES.
ta_donk_gt 10y ago
This is a natural result of hyper-partisanship, which is a natural result of groups separating into their preferred echo chambers, which is a natural result of it being easy to move to said echo chambers, which is a natural result of the internet. In these hyper-partisan environments, everyone is afraid to tell the whole truth because Team A might use pieces of Team B's statements against them (see the sibling comments about feminism and global warming, or anything around the current election, but any and every partisan topic applies). So what happens is people choose tidbits of truth that fully support their side's claims and ignore the rest of truth, and make sure everyone on their team follows suit. These tidbits of truth then get used in broader contexts and somehow become universal truths. These now universal truths are not questioned in one's own echo chamber because it would work against their shared goals. Team B then admonishes Team A within the Team B echo chamber because of the obvious ignorance of reality of the truth tidbits that became universal truths. The (not so) funny thing is that Team B is completely unaware that they do exactly the same thing. So, inside the Team A echo chamber all you hear is how the other side is completely ignorant of reality, suppresses the truth, ignores facts, outright lies and deceives, while our team is where the logic and reason exist. And the exact same thing is happening in the Team B echo chamber. Both teams are equally fervent about their superiority over the other team. And both sides have the same answer to the problem: get rid of the other team's echo chambers and everything will be fine. The actual truth cannot exist in this kind of environment.
zelias 10y ago
"These violent delights have violent ends"
empath75 10y ago
Brains never evolved to present reality to its owner. It's there to help you survive. You're totally free to build up an internal world view that only has the most tenuous attachment to reality, as long as it doesn't interfere with your ability to make a living and have kids (in an evolutionary sense). When reality becomes inconvenient to people, they'll happily ignore it and do whatever it takes to get by. As long as they're not ignoring something that's going to imminently harm them, they can get away with it for a long, long time, especially when they can find a community that reinforces it. You also never know what people actually believe, in their heart of hearts, and they may be professing nonsense so they can signal that their in some group, or because it's what they think you should believe, or what you they think that you want them to believe, etc.

pyre 10y ago

In a world where special interests all vie for the ability to manipulate the "accepted truth," we have those same special interests to thank for people's lack of trust in the system.

NetStrikeForce 10y ago
Of course propaganda works. Water is wet and all that. The problem is a worrying lack of critical thinking.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Propaganda wouldn't work if people at large were able to think critically enough to counteract it. Most people implicitly trust whatever they've come to believe is authoritative. It's much more likely that someone will reject a truth from an untrusted source than an untruth, even a clear untruth, from a trusted source. This is always true at some level. There is so much data on everything that all of it cannot be considered and independently evaluated by each person; at some point you have to believe that someone else who knows more about this than you do has verified the claims.

bduerst 10y ago

I keep seeing this "post-truth world" [1] term - where did the term get coined? [1] http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/teach-philosophy-to-heal-our-post-truth-society-says-president-higgins-1.2875247 http://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/teach-philosophy-to...