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We're never going to figure out how to rebuild trust until we can figure out how to redesign our systems of government and commerce to not reward lying and mani

We're never going to figure out how to rebuild trust until we can figure out how to redesign our systems of government and commerce to not reward lying and manipulation, or at least to mitigate its appeal. The problem has never been that we don't know how to overcome human biases, the problem is that we don't even really want to because exploiting them for political power and financial gain is so lucrative.

jfengel 7y ago
My opinion, which is obviously reflecting my own bias, is that there is a very large segment of the US who really ought to know better, and that there isn't much we can do until they choose to do so. They've crossed the line from the ordinary kind of biases, selfishness, and differences of opinion to active malice. That has been exploited by those seeking power and money, but that exploitation is so transparent that they can't be unaware. They accede to it because their top priority has become the fight itself and defeating their opponents -- even though those opponents are fellow citizens. That allows them to buy into even the most obvious deceptions, because it affirms for them the deeper truth. I've expressed this in nonpartisan terms, but I'm willing to bet that everybody knows who I'm talking about, and they will object. I'm not going to engage -- the whole point here is that I don't believe engaging will achieve anything. And it also means that their attempts to convince me will similarly be ignored -- either because I'm right, or precisely because I'm wrong. The irony bugs the hell out of me.
- allovernow 7y ago
  >that there is a very large segment of the US who really ought to know better My take is not so optimistic. Intelligence is roughly normally distributed, and the fat middle, 100±1 stddev or so, simply does not know better, and does not have the requisite brainpower to think past social conditioning, whether from friends or propaganda. Particularly when the average person has a life to live and won't spend much or any of that time verifying anything. At the very least the capable among us are better able to prioritize which facts to take time to verify, while the average person probably doesn't verify anything rigorously at all.
  - aalleavitch 7y ago
    Again, this isn't just some necessary aspect of human nature. This is something that very powerful people actively want to be the case, because when people behave in this manner it's easier to manipulate their behavior on a broad scale. This is the explicit purpose of modern marketing. I don't honestly think it has anything to do with being "capable", I think it has to do with having the time and resources to learn how or even why they should want to in the first place. Most people don't. Most people have to work to eat and if they're not too exhausted to do anything than passively absorb entertainment when they get home that just means their boss isn't getting their full value out of them.
- aalleavitch 7y ago
  If 45% of your population "ought to know better" that's not just a moral failure of a handful of people, that's a systemic problem. The solution isn't "they just need to figure it out", something very fundamental needs to change.
  - jfengel 7y ago
    Yeah, though I'm afraid I can't tell you what. I think it's really fundamental, something that will require a serious reconsideration of the entire social contract.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  Are you really that sure you're right, and not the victim of propaganda yourself?
  - minikites 7y ago
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/florida-government-shutdown-marianna.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/florida-government-shu... “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt... >Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
  - tunesmith 7y ago
    A good test question each person can ask for themselves is, "Do you take joy in the suffering of others?" If you do, you are likely on the wrong side.
    - retsibsi 7y ago
      Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the problem with that test (aside from the likelihood of self-deception) is that there are people on every side of every issue who would fail it. edit: I actually think this is a serious point, because it speaks to the difficulty of short-cutting your way to a correct opinion by looking at the character and motives of people participating in the debate. For any political or moral position with a non-trivial number of supporters, I could find examples of proponents being cruel, irrational, intellectually inconsistent, plainly dishonest, and so on. Not necessarily an equal number of examples -- often one side of an issue really does attract worse/dumber people -- but always enough to give you a pretty dim view of that group, and by extension that side of the debate. And unfortunately I think this plays a big role in how we actually make up our minds. It's unsurprising, and probably necessary, that we cluster issues together and apply some social heuristics rather than independently investigating every topic in depth. 'Do the people who support this set of policies seem smart and benevolent?' is a reasonable heuristic when applied to a fair sample. But unfortunately it's also a really easy heuristic to hack, simply by cherry-picking the best/worst examples. This can be done deliberately by others, lazily by ourselves, randomly by circumstance, or blindly by social media algorithms, but in each case the effect is similar. (Of course, the extra complication is that this heuristic can easily fail even when applied perfectly. Maybe a position is attractive to many people for bad reasons, while also being attractive to open-minded experts because the facts ultimately back it up. The experts will usually be outnumbered, so a random sample will show the majority of people with the correct opinion holding it for bad reasons.)
- irrational 7y ago
  >I've expressed this in nonpartisan terms, but I'm willing to bet that everybody knows who I'm talking about Honestly, I have no idea. Reading the first two paragraphs my first thought was that it's scary that I have no idea what side of the political divide this might more fully describe. Then I came to this sentence and realized that you did have a side you were thinking of.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  Imagine if every time a nerdy news site got popular and influential, a whole group of astroturfers descended on it. At first it would be companies with commercial interests (and sometimes the nerdy news site would even be formed by a company as a kind of place to express and maybe influence opinions). As the nerdy news site became more and more popular, the news stories would shift from highly technical issues, to more political ones. Over time, the comments section would start to become more polarised as people rallied to support their chosen points of view. Conversations and ideas would carefully be stoked or extinguished by people wishing to push the concensus view in one direction or the other. At some point it becomes really obvious what is happening. Anybody who lived through the rise and fall of Slashdot has already seen it. However, before it becomes really obvious, is it actually clear what's going on? Does one really understand one is being manipulated? When one jumps into a conversation and pushes an important point, is it obvious that the point originated at this very nerdy news site? Are we all clear on how we formed our ideas, who influenced us and where we got the supporting evidence to convince ourselves that we've got it right? Or do we rely on our gut feelings and participate in the echo chamber? I don't believe anybody really understands the extent to which they are manipulated. That's the nature of manipulation.
StanislavPetrov 7y ago
>We're never going to figure out how to rebuild trust I'd argue the solution towards a better society is figuring out how to eliminate trust all together, rather than trying to figure out how to make it more widespread. The issue isn't, "lack of trust", its that different groups of people place arbitrary trust in sources of authority that are perceived by them to be legitimate. The answer is to promote universal skepticism and reliance on the Socratic Method in all things. Trust nothing, verify everything and value logical consistency above all things.
- jdashg 7y ago
  This approach has failed.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  Answer is genetic modification, I believe. If you can change brain's reward system to not fall in those cracks, we can have a much better society. Instead of designing a system fit for humans, we should design humans fit for the system. :3
thrwaway69 7y ago
Schadenfreude is strong in humans especially young people (main demography of internet) and multiple papers link increased effect of it in people with depression. It feels cyclic, increased internet usage leading to mental health problems leading to you caring less about others and isolation with negative thoughts being magnified online (who are curators?) and other normal users being driven towards it through social conformation and increased internet usage is probably caused by failures of parenting, school, society and environment. Lack of mentorship and models. Some of it could be attributed to disconnection and huge disparity in problems people face - inequality, literate supremacy, global impression and visibility in what you can get. Social media might be perhaps incentivising some of the behaviors but it's not the root cause of it perhaps? Maybe the notion of a good healthy society is finally crumbling due to visibility? Being forced to admit that world is unfair most of your day is not very healthy imo and its effects are stronger the more big of a disparity there is. I think education could help there with compulsory classes on how to deal with negative thoughts, differences and other problematic behaviors before you need to drip into antidepressants and years of therapy. Oh not to mention the statistics trend, the one most 'rationalists' fall for. I am tired of extrapolation and over fitting in everything these days. It hides problems so so well. 1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=schadenfreude&oq=schadenf https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=scha...

jfengel 7y ago

My opinion, which is obviously reflecting my own bias, is that there is a very large segment of the US who really ought to know better, and that there isn't much we can do until they choose to do so. They've crossed the line from the ordinary kind of biases, selfishness, and differences of opinion to active malice. That has been exploited by those seeking power and money, but that exploitation is so transparent that they can't be unaware. They accede to it because their top priority has become the fight itself and defeating their opponents -- even though those opponents are fellow citizens. That allows them to buy into even the most obvious deceptions, because it affirms for them the deeper truth. I've expressed this in nonpartisan terms, but I'm willing to bet that everybody knows who I'm talking about, and they will object. I'm not going to engage -- the whole point here is that I don't believe engaging will achieve anything. And it also means that their attempts to convince me will similarly be ignored -- either because I'm right, or precisely because I'm wrong. The irony bugs the hell out of me.

allovernow 7y ago
>that there is a very large segment of the US who really ought to know better My take is not so optimistic. Intelligence is roughly normally distributed, and the fat middle, 100±1 stddev or so, simply does not know better, and does not have the requisite brainpower to think past social conditioning, whether from friends or propaganda. Particularly when the average person has a life to live and won't spend much or any of that time verifying anything. At the very least the capable among us are better able to prioritize which facts to take time to verify, while the average person probably doesn't verify anything rigorously at all.
- aalleavitch 7y ago
  Again, this isn't just some necessary aspect of human nature. This is something that very powerful people actively want to be the case, because when people behave in this manner it's easier to manipulate their behavior on a broad scale. This is the explicit purpose of modern marketing. I don't honestly think it has anything to do with being "capable", I think it has to do with having the time and resources to learn how or even why they should want to in the first place. Most people don't. Most people have to work to eat and if they're not too exhausted to do anything than passively absorb entertainment when they get home that just means their boss isn't getting their full value out of them.
aalleavitch 7y ago
If 45% of your population "ought to know better" that's not just a moral failure of a handful of people, that's a systemic problem. The solution isn't "they just need to figure it out", something very fundamental needs to change.
- jfengel 7y ago
  Yeah, though I'm afraid I can't tell you what. I think it's really fundamental, something that will require a serious reconsideration of the entire social contract.
WalterBright 7y ago
Are you really that sure you're right, and not the victim of propaganda yourself?
- minikites 7y ago
  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/florida-government-shutdown-marianna.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/us/florida-government-shu... “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelt... >Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
- tunesmith 7y ago
  A good test question each person can ask for themselves is, "Do you take joy in the suffering of others?" If you do, you are likely on the wrong side.
  - retsibsi 7y ago
    Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the problem with that test (aside from the likelihood of self-deception) is that there are people on every side of every issue who would fail it. edit: I actually think this is a serious point, because it speaks to the difficulty of short-cutting your way to a correct opinion by looking at the character and motives of people participating in the debate. For any political or moral position with a non-trivial number of supporters, I could find examples of proponents being cruel, irrational, intellectually inconsistent, plainly dishonest, and so on. Not necessarily an equal number of examples -- often one side of an issue really does attract worse/dumber people -- but always enough to give you a pretty dim view of that group, and by extension that side of the debate. And unfortunately I think this plays a big role in how we actually make up our minds. It's unsurprising, and probably necessary, that we cluster issues together and apply some social heuristics rather than independently investigating every topic in depth. 'Do the people who support this set of policies seem smart and benevolent?' is a reasonable heuristic when applied to a fair sample. But unfortunately it's also a really easy heuristic to hack, simply by cherry-picking the best/worst examples. This can be done deliberately by others, lazily by ourselves, randomly by circumstance, or blindly by social media algorithms, but in each case the effect is similar. (Of course, the extra complication is that this heuristic can easily fail even when applied perfectly. Maybe a position is attractive to many people for bad reasons, while also being attractive to open-minded experts because the facts ultimately back it up. The experts will usually be outnumbered, so a random sample will show the majority of people with the correct opinion holding it for bad reasons.)
irrational 7y ago
>I've expressed this in nonpartisan terms, but I'm willing to bet that everybody knows who I'm talking about Honestly, I have no idea. Reading the first two paragraphs my first thought was that it's scary that I have no idea what side of the political divide this might more fully describe. Then I came to this sentence and realized that you did have a side you were thinking of.
mikekchar 7y ago
Imagine if every time a nerdy news site got popular and influential, a whole group of astroturfers descended on it. At first it would be companies with commercial interests (and sometimes the nerdy news site would even be formed by a company as a kind of place to express and maybe influence opinions). As the nerdy news site became more and more popular, the news stories would shift from highly technical issues, to more political ones. Over time, the comments section would start to become more polarised as people rallied to support their chosen points of view. Conversations and ideas would carefully be stoked or extinguished by people wishing to push the concensus view in one direction or the other. At some point it becomes really obvious what is happening. Anybody who lived through the rise and fall of Slashdot has already seen it. However, before it becomes really obvious, is it actually clear what's going on? Does one really understand one is being manipulated? When one jumps into a conversation and pushes an important point, is it obvious that the point originated at this very nerdy news site? Are we all clear on how we formed our ideas, who influenced us and where we got the supporting evidence to convince ourselves that we've got it right? Or do we rely on our gut feelings and participate in the echo chamber? I don't believe anybody really understands the extent to which they are manipulated. That's the nature of manipulation.

StanislavPetrov 7y ago

>We're never going to figure out how to rebuild trust I'd argue the solution towards a better society is figuring out how to eliminate trust all together, rather than trying to figure out how to make it more widespread. The issue isn't, "lack of trust", its that different groups of people place arbitrary trust in sources of authority that are perceived by them to be legitimate. The answer is to promote universal skepticism and reliance on the Socratic Method in all things. Trust nothing, verify everything and value logical consistency above all things.

jdashg 7y ago
This approach has failed.
thrwaway69 7y ago
Answer is genetic modification, I believe. If you can change brain's reward system to not fall in those cracks, we can have a much better society. Instead of designing a system fit for humans, we should design humans fit for the system. :3

thrwaway69 7y ago

Schadenfreude is strong in humans especially young people (main demography of internet) and multiple papers link increased effect of it in people with depression. It feels cyclic, increased internet usage leading to mental health problems leading to you caring less about others and isolation with negative thoughts being magnified online (who are curators?) and other normal users being driven towards it through social conformation and increased internet usage is probably caused by failures of parenting, school, society and environment. Lack of mentorship and models. Some of it could be attributed to disconnection and huge disparity in problems people face - inequality, literate supremacy, global impression and visibility in what you can get. Social media might be perhaps incentivising some of the behaviors but it's not the root cause of it perhaps? Maybe the notion of a good healthy society is finally crumbling due to visibility? Being forced to admit that world is unfair most of your day is not very healthy imo and its effects are stronger the more big of a disparity there is. I think education could help there with compulsory classes on how to deal with negative thoughts, differences and other problematic behaviors before you need to drip into antidepressants and years of therapy. Oh not to mention the statistics trend, the one most 'rationalists' fall for. I am tired of extrapolation and over fitting in everything these days. It hides problems so so well. 1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=schadenfreude&oq=schadenf https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=scha...