11 ms·

Seems to me that it is none of the things in that diagram, and there is a sort of supraproblem above all of those, which is the ongoing and increasing societal

• tesseract 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
  • 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
    Probably related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American...
• sandworm101 10y ago
  Unless an aware public is the problem. The first step in defining a new reality is destroying any current reality. Not everyone wants truth and facts. People, paticularly the US public, enjoy myths. They want to live the fantasy. They really dont see disconnection with reality as a problem. It is a necessary step towards a more universal acceptance of thier construct. The myth is simple and comforting. It is far easier to accept than gritty reality. But you first have to disconnect. Those who knowingly push disconnection upon others feel they are a force for good.
  • veidr 10y ago
    Perhaps, but I would argue that they are wrong about that.
  • hueving 10y ago
    >They really dont see disconnection with reality as a problem This is a misrepresentation. They don't see it as a disconnect with reality, they see it as reality. Through all sorts of biases and rationalizations, people will still think their model of reality is true with lots of exceptions that keep getting in the way. Once you take a belief to be true, you will go through incredible mental gymnastics to explain away any conflicting evidence without even realizing it.
    • sandworm101 10y ago
      But you forget the class structure of belief. At the top are pushers who dictate a reality to those below them. They don't buy into myths and instead use them. Watch a US senator spew lies and his supporters lap it up. The senator doesn't actually believe the lies, he just uses them to advance whatever agenda he thinks best. The senator thinks he is doing good because his agenda is better regardless of what he needs to do to sell it. The people trust and believe. They find it comforting. Everyone participates even though a chosen few do not believe. This class structure worked well enough for generations, although lately it is running off the rails. The top pusher appears to actually believe the myth. The monkeys is now his own grinder and nobody knows what will come of it.
      • hueving 10y ago
        But we're not talking about the few at the top. The comment I was replying to is talking about the public. >People, paticularly the US public, enjoy myths. I'm stating that the public doesn't think what they believe is a myth.
• mc32 10y ago
  I'm really surprised healthcare isn't an bigger concern for people. Even while having good employer provided health benefits, I'm still worried about the costs --to employer or to out of pocket payers. The more money as a percentage spent on healthcare, the less available for other things, including compensation. It's really something which needs to be brought under control. Without healthcare we don't have a healthy American workforce.
  • old-gregg 10y ago
    I agree. Mid-range $700/mo insurance plans on health exchanges have deductibles approaching $12K, meanwhile 62% of families have less than $1K in savings. This means that even after paying $8,400 per year in insurance premiums, a moderate illness automatically puts an average insured American family into a medical bankruptcy. The honorable American corporate tradition to have company-wide fundraisers to support the families of (insured!) employees who have gotten sick is... terribly out of place in a 21st century / 1st world country.
    • lostlogin 10y ago
      These fundraisers happen? Are they common?
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • facetube 10y ago
        Yes. And middleman capitalism, as always, is right there to skim some money off the top: https://www.gofundme.com/medical-fundraising https://www.gofundme.com/medical-fundraising.
• majormajor 10y ago
  This is only seen as a problem if the experts are seen as beneficial. For instance, even on HN people love to take potshots at nutritional guidelines that resulted in low-fat/high-sugar diets, or boneheaded regulation holding back [new cool disruptive thing]. It's not even relevant why (if the experts were just wrong, or bought off, or what), but the more examples you see, the less you'll just trust what "the establishment" tells you.
• ams6110 10y ago
  I wonder if any of this could be related to the past couple of decades trend in education that has reduced the emphasis on memorization of facts. People arrive at adulthood with very little objective factual knowledge, leaving them unable to discern fact from fiction or even really understanding why they should.
  • aaron-lebo 10y ago
    People are clearly better educated than they used to be. What was the literacy rate in 1900, for example? How many people had college degrees in 1960? I think it's simpler than that. When anyone can pull out their smartphone and record someone or criticize someone in a blog post, it's hard to hide behind the naive notion that the authorities know what they are doing. For any given person or position you can find hundreds of examples of dishonesty, incompetence, or pure stupidity. In that environment, why would anyone trust the traditional gatekeepers? They aren't the gatekeepers anymore and in a bid to remain relevant they often sacrifice objectivity in search of cheap gimmicks and entertainment. Fareed Zakaria has put forward the notion that elites in the 50s and 60s used to see themselves as having a civic duty. That doesn't exist anymore. An easy comparison is the Ivy League generations of Bushes vs Trump. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom ...This is then applied to America to argue that the increased democratization of American society and culture is what has caused the perceived failures of the government and governing elites. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/overdoing-democracy.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/overdoing-democracy.... It sounds WASPish on its face, but there are some good points.
    • veidr 10y ago
      I like your idea that being inundated with information is part of the cause. That seems likely. Still, I feel like the phenomenon that I'm trying (perhaps poorly) to articulate is distinct from education. I mean related to some degree, certainly, but I see it in highly educated people as well as the uneducated. E.g., a mechanical engineer with multiple degrees from prestigious universities going on about how the Sandy Hook mass murder of 20 young children was actually a hoax perpetrated by the US government as part of an elaborate scheme to rescind gun rights. He's a smart guy, at least in other contexts in which I've interacted with him; he should be able to use the information readily available to him and come to his own conclusion that this idea is completely preposterous. And yet, he can't. Or less heart-stopping but still baffling: a fake news item I actually saw people I know professionally forwarding around during the election: "Outrage: Obama bans national anthem from all major sporting events!" I mean you don't have to click through to know. That's not real; it can't be real; no president has ever or would ever do that; etc... And these people are educated, I mean they are at least college graduates, mostly... I agree that trust in gatekeepers has declined, but I think that makes sense. I suspect though, that people in America are also declining in their ability to serve as their own judges of information, and that is the thing I am talking about. It's of course possible that I'm wrong; maybe it just used to be less evident how many people were unable to arrive at a plausible conclusion from a set of facts, and now it's more obvious because the culture normalized confidently spewing completely unsubstantiated horseshit, while the technology has emerged to let anybody who feels like it do it all day long...
• Meta1234 10y ago
  I think this is a cause of individualism in society today and the lack of proper debate as it was intended. The effects of this are as you say. People are forming their own realities and picking bits and pieces of the truth from wherever they frequent for their news and discarding anything that they don't agree with. That in turn is spewed out in many different forms which will eventually spread its way into society. The effect is only amplified by everyone being always connected and able to share their thoughts. I think this is one of the more pressing issues we deal with as a society today.
  • orasis 10y ago
    Ken Wilbur would say that the end result of post-modernism is narcissism and nihilism.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • evv555 10y ago
      Wilber
• hueving 10y ago
  I suspect one of the causes of this is that it's so incredibly easy now to find articles in the Internet that support your viewpoints that can then be shared rapidly amongst your filter bubble. It used to be the case that there was a non negligible barrier to get an idea published and in front of the eyes of millions of people. You had to find a publisher, pay for publication, and then convince stores to carry a book/magazine/whatever. With the Internet, you can put up a blog post and share it on Facebook with a budget of $0 (or bus fare to the library). It's just as simple to find websites that support a view of the moon landing not happening as it is to find websites that do. Both are just a Google search away.
  • themaninthedark 10y ago
    And before there was a huge barrier to entry you had many small news papers and Gadfly's. And then before the printing press the barrier to entry was high again.
• sgustard 10y ago
  This view is too simplistic. Many people believe that truths are being hidden from them or intentionally distorted. Distrust of the media and belief in conspiracy theories are rampant. So it's not rejection of facts, it's rejection of the corrupt elites that are reporting them. Obviously I don't believe this and I find it hard to empathize with these folks. I spent the holidays listening to my cousin tell me how naive I was for believing what I read in the New York Times, then rant for hours about how mass shootings are all staged hoaxes.
  • vosper 10y ago
    I am constantly surprised by how many intelligent, generally rational people I meet also believe in (what I consider) absurd conspiracy theories. I've had people talk to me seriously about chemtrails, free energy devices being suppressed by oil company assassins, flouride in the water for mind control...
    • anigbrowl 10y ago
      Conspiracy theories are sort of a hobby of mine - I've gone from feeling disappointed that they almost never turn out to be true (since they often make interesting claims) to fascination with why people believe them. Most conspiracy theories start with a false premise to which logic is then applied -often correctly. A trivial example popular among geeky music lovers is that instruments and whole compositions sound better tuned to 432Hz rather than the more common 440Hz. Much effort i devoted to showing why 432 is more numerically interesting than 440, and since 99% of music is about the juxtaposition of numerically interesting frequency rations, the arguments are superficially quite convincing, especially from an aesthetic point of view. Where it falls down is right at the beginning - not in the idea that 432 is an interesting number (it is) but in the idea that 432 cycles per second is important. People tend to forget that the second is a pretty arbitrary time division; we're just used to think about time as a fact because it is convenient in everyday life. Pro musicians and sound engineers are constantly thinking about frequencies to the quantity of a second comed to seem as real as the pull of earth's gravity to an aerospace engineer. In my experience, the longer the argument between an initial false premise and the conclusion, the more firmly the proponent will resist attacks on the theory, perhaps because it has required a higher initial investment of work to validate all the logical steps.
• gydfi 10y ago
  It strikes me that the people who crow about "facts" the loudest are the ones most likely to be conflating facts with their own opinions. I'm a scientist. I don't believe in facts. I believe in models, explanations, measurements with appropriate error bars, provisional theories and educated guesses, but never facts. When somebody comes to me claiming that they know "the facts" I put up my defences. Perhaps what people really need is not a better appreciation of facts but a more realistic appreciation of uncertainties. Perhaps if we could all stop arguing about whether the probability of disastrous climate change is 0 or 1, and instead accept that it's somewhere between 0.01 and 0.99, then we could make some progress on the issue.
  • veidr 10y ago
    Perhaps, but good luck getting people to do that. I don't think the climate change "argument" the American society is currently having is about whether the probability of its existence is 0 or 1; it's about whether it's 0 or not 0.
    • gydfi 10y ago
      Not at all, it seems to me it's more like whether it's 1 or not 1. Expressing any skepticism gets you branded as a "skeptic" and then a "denier". Of course what the "not 1" crowd tend to miss is that you don't need 100% certainty about something before you take action on it. If you're in a plane with a 50% chance of fire on board then the procedures are pretty much the same as a plane with a 100% chance of fire on board.
      • flukus 10y ago
        > Expressing any skepticism gets you branded as a "skeptic" and then a "denier". Usually I see (and throw out myself) these terms when someone bandies around any of the common denialist talking points like "we used to be concerned about global cooling" or "it hasn't cooled since '98". Unfortunately the "ladder of knowledge" is more of a mouse wheel and the same people will end up using the same arguments, even when they're shown to be wrong.
  • 10y ago
• nilkn 10y ago
  What I've noticed is that folks are taking a pretty healthy mistrust of the establishment and turning it into the opposite extreme without realizing what they're doing. Instead of maintaining skepticism towards both the establishment and anti-establishment (of which Trump was a part), they do two things: (1) elevate their moderate mistrust of the establishment into total, exhaustive mistrust (i.e., they assume everything from the establishment is a lie with a malicious motive). (2) place total, exhaustive trust into the anti-establishment (i.e., Trump is perfect, every cabinet pick is perfect, every EO is perfect, everything Spicer says is completely true, everything Trump says is completely true, etc.). It's this extreme warping of trust which causes people to be so incredibly susceptible to genuine fake news. When you combine (1) and (2), you end up with conspiracy theories and lots of people who sincerely believe them with no evidence. The idea that Clinton is/was running pedophilia and child sex trafficking rings out of pizza shops is a great example.
  • csallen 10y ago
    I've seen the same. There's a stunning lack of nuance in public thought. Thinking in degrees is difficult, so things get reduced to good vs evil, black vs white, all or nothing. Even amongst friends I respect, I have a hard time getting people to do the hard work of looking past high level simplifications and enumerating specific costs and benefits of any decision or proposal.
    • nojvek 10y ago
      We are getting to a point where "trust" is the biggest issue. Can you trust govt, big corporations, universities? It's like everyone is optimizing for their gain and deceiving the other side with what they need to hear. We are in the era of information overload without a good way of filtering fact from dogma. I hope there is some development of good AI that helps the average Joe hunt this facts down for him/her. Google's fact verification algorithm is in the right direction. Can we trust it? I hope Facebook implements something similar but that's unlikely since they're in the entertainment and ads business. I really hope orgs like openai are able to create something like this for the world.
• cel1ne 10y ago
  You can call it stupidity and it keeps growing since many years. I guess TV started it. Main reasons for it are a mixture of loss of introspection and completely unrealistic expectations due to constant medial input and constant communication with peers. You want better people? Make parents sit down and talk to their children every single day: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/diet-is-4-letter-word/201309/the-death-the-family-meal https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/diet-is-4-letter-word/2... Of course it will take at least one generation to undo the damaged that has been done. Don't keep searching for simpler reasons or solutions. I don't believe there are any. The rest of this post is a repost from me https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724851: We live in the age of fear because the hose of information that floods us is constantly opened further: Letters → Telegram → Telephone → Radio → TV → Internet → Mobile Internet. Human beings need time to manage their emotions. Time spent waiting. Time being bored. Time when NO new information, not even positive, is arriving. We are constantly distracted and thus increasingly unable to sort out our feelings. That is the reason. And distracted parents that can't give their children at least 15 minutes of absolutely undivided attention per day worsen their offspring's ability to manage emotions even further. That is why Zuckerberg/Facebook's idea "just flood everyone with everything and it will get better" is dead-wrong. What Facebook could do to really help the world is turning off it's platform for one day each week.
  • veidr 10y ago
    I guess the reason I feel it's different than "stupidity" is I think of that as a trait, whereas this thing feels like a new (or at least increasing) behavior. Not like "you cannot derive basic conclusions from simple inputs because you were unfortunately born without ability to do that", but more like "you refuse to derive basic conclusions from simple inputs because _________________." The reasons aren't clear and are possibly complex and subconscious, but it seems more about refusing to do the basic mental processing, despite having the capability to do it.
    • _98fj 10y ago
      Refusing to do mental processing, despite having the capability. Sawing at the branch you're sitting on. That fits my description of acting and behaving stupid. The reason are emotions, many of them subconscious, like you said. Emotional patterns can be complex, but the solution isn't: Less pressure and fear mongering. More appreciation, time and space for children to grow into responsible adults. I don't think we're able to steer the ship around though, unfortunately.
• xyzzy123 10y ago
  Well, the more politicised something is, the less "knowable" it is without serious research. For example if we were to talk about unemployment rate (e.g. discouraged workers vs total labour force participation vs e.g. push towards counting long term unemployed as disability, statistical corrections for season, definition of temporary versus permanent) it's possible to pick a metric which will satisfy almost any narrative. Taking into account changes in definition, policy changes and then segregating by demographic to create factoids at will and yeah, I do think that's a real problem. Just out of interest, do you believe unemployment is up or down compared to this time last year?
  • veidr 10y ago
    You make a good point. Especially if the definition of "politicizing" something includes "lying, subtly or blatantly, about something in order to advance your agenda". (Which I think it always has.) That does make things harder to know, and unemployment is a good example. To answer your question, off the top of my head I think the unemployment rate is about the same (+/- 0.5%?) as it was this time last year, and rounds to 5%. However I am pretty sure that the reason I think that is because that's what the US Dept. of Labor says. It's an interesting example because it's not a topic on which I have expertise, so I've (tentatively, maintaining some uncertainty) decided to go with what I perceive to be the most credible authority on the matter. I've heard many of the alternate narratives, but haven't been convinced, probably because I usually perceive some ulterior motivation along with them (leaving aside candidate Trump's insane "42%" claim, which is something different). This is exactly what makes me despair of the current environment; I don't want to do a bunch of my own research to tease out the unemployment rate. I would much prefer it if society would promote achieving an accurate consensus on this kind of issue, by collectively punishing blatant liars and diminishing their credibility, and on the other hand reacting with outrage if the official government statistics were politicized. That seems not to be the trendline we are on, though... P.S. Am I wrong to place my trust in the official unemployment statistics? ;-)
    • MagnumOpus 10y ago
      > I don't want to do a bunch of my own research to tease out the unemployment rate. Conspiracy theorists and the people who sell them newsletters don't want to do that either. That's why most of these conspiracist stories boil down to either amateurishly misinterpreting existing measures - e.g. alleging that the unemployment rate must be 100% minus the employment/population ratio - or trying to spin conspiracy where it doesn't exist, say by alleging that the US government is fudging statistics by not reporting the higher/wider U-6 measure of unemployment more prominently (U-6 is about twice the "official" unemployment rate at any given time - and has been for ever).
• DanielBMarkham 10y ago
  This is because it's become quite common knowledge that wherever there's management to the numbers or the numbers relate to any kind of political issue, the numbers are rigged in some way. Want to make it look like the U.S. has a lower life expectancy? Include preemie deaths (The U.S. has the highest rate of trying to save premature babies. Many die. In other countries these deaths are not considered part of the life expectancy measurement) Want to show gun violence is bigger than it is? Include gun suicides. What's the unemployment rate? Are you including people looking for work or people who have given up? How about the under-employed? Now it's perfectly fine to argue the points and definitions on any of these stats and measurements, but the average person has realized that stats are all like that. Any stat that includes the human experience across multiple dimensions is suspect. I'm fortunate in that I remember back the "old days" of the net where we had the same amount of political BS but fewer sources of "facts". We'd argue for a while then somebody would take an hour or two and dig up an academic study and that would quiet things down. This is no longer the case. What happens now is that no matter your opinion, there are studies and internet sites dedicated to providing you with supporting material. Add in a few rhetorical tricks you see on TV and you can carry on any argument based around "science" ad infinitum. So I don't see this as some new form of anti-intellectualism. Rather I see it as people -- perhaps people who aren't so smart, admittedly -- figuring out what the game is and moving on to more personally important things in their lives.
• dredmorbius 10y ago
  I do agree that the problems listed are more on the order of symptoms than fundamental causes. I'm not convinced that anti-realism is that fundamental cause, though it's quite certainly a major confounding factor. Cory Doctorow in a recent Boing Boing article: "we're not living through a crisis about what is true, we're living through a crisis about how we know whether something is true. We're not disagreeing about facts, we're disagreeing about epistemology." https://boingboing.net/2017/02/25/counternarratives-not-fact-che.html https://boingboing.net/2017/02/25/counternarratives-not-fact... I see the problems as of limits and distributionalism, most fundamentally. That's a longer story.
• pokemongoaway 10y ago
  There's no such thing as "anti-realityism." Yes, we really have this many deluded and/or mentally ill people in our world.