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people have been programmed, on a massive scale, to react emotionally to certain learned key phrases and terms. when this automatic emotional reaction occurs, a

people have been programmed, on a massive scale, to react emotionally to certain learned key phrases and terms. when this automatic emotional reaction occurs, all logical processing ceases immediately, and the person you're talking to either immediately leaves the conversation (if you're lucky) or starts emotionally, verbally attacking you as though your non-conforming line of thought is a pathogen and their overreacting response is an antibody swarm. you're a strawman caricature of everything evil and wrong if you question basic learned political orthodoxy, even if you make it clear you're approaching the topic with an open mind. TV and social media "debates" between politicians are 100% posturing, signaling, and rhetoric without any substance, and almost nobody can see it, everyone thinks their guy won. it's as though we've forgotten how to think for ourselves and have opinions and stances that lay outside dogmatic groupthink. I even know a few people who think of themselves as "free thinkers" who nevertheless hitch their proverbial cart to some political eceleb personality's proverbial horse, buying into everything they say, wholesale. people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way.

gnagatomo 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala_hijack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala_hijack
- hilbert42 6y ago
  Yeah, exactly. And my amygdala is over sensitive and I wish I had a gain control fitted to it so that I could turn it down occasionally. (Anyway, at least I know it's prone to over-sensitivity, and that's somewhat helpful. ;-) )
ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. But also decades of materialism and "me me me" culture: I think people learn to follow their desires no-matter-what when buying goods or services and the same emotional mechanism is transferred into "buying in" an idea. Modern advertising and branding is based on emotion and vague ideas. The same algorithms to target online ads have been used to influence politics (see cambridge analytica). > stances that lay outside dogmatic groupthink Yes, but with a caveat: an idea can be labeled "groupthink" and "too political" as a tactic to dismiss it easily.
- sangnoir 6y ago
  > Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. Way before social media, there was short wave radio, then cable news which introduced the 24-hour news cycle, and entertainment-shows-disguised-as-news with their permanently outraged talking heads (think Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson). Political polarization is older than social media, and it wasn't emergent - it was a deliberate political tactic and it worked well enough until the other side adopted it too. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma and both sides are now locked into a cycle of defecting - doing otherwise makes no sense, and there aren't many deescalation off-ramps.
  - ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
    > Political polarization is older than social media Yes, it was widely reported in debates in ancient Athens and the Roman empire. But I wrote "Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking.", which is different. Humanity has never seen before a billion-dollar industry generating user engagement by fueling online altercation. Instant gratification, dopamine cycle addiction and all of that.
    - scruple 6y ago
      Maybe there should be IRB-style oversight for Twitter, etc..., to tweak their algorithms. They are, after all, experimenting on humans here.
      - Nasrudith 6y ago
        Literally any change would count as "an experiment". Not just for algorithims but for "do people like to buy this new product". Saying there should be limited changes of algorithms is a popular "hot take" but it fundamentally doesn't make any goddamned sense. Human experiments being activities defined by the subject instead of the object make more sense. Can you have the human-involved experiment with just the objects occur naturally? You cannot just leave the props lying around a college campus and get a Milgram's experiment replication attempt. You cannot just have a freezing chamber or scalpels to repeat the horrors of nazi Germany and Unit 731.
froh 6y ago
Sometimes I wonder if this mechanism (another post referred to "amygdala hijack") makes concepts like personal gender pronouns and similar "correct and incorrect speech" concepts so delicate. get me right, language is deliberately abused to exercise power, to belittle others, by deliberately misgendering them or deliberately not using their academic title, etc. However if I want to have a conversation about something of importance and my conversation participant is not there yet, should I not ignore misgendering or omission of academic titles or similar heckling from their side, simply to get into a conversation about the topic proper, and then, should the conversation participant surprisingly evolve into a conversation partner, then ask about pronouns, or academic title, or whichever language convention I prefer? Why do I say this? If the other participant does not intend to evolve into a conversation partner, they will for lack of a better term jack off on heckling on the wrong pronoun or title or whatever it is that I may be asking for. I will never get to the core of what I want to discuss with that participant. > people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way. Or people have forgotten how to have a proper conversation, an engaged dialogue about topics they disagree on, at least in parts.
hilbert42 6y ago
"people have been programmed, on a massive scale, to react emotionally to certain learned key phrases and terms.' You're right about that and it scares me, especially so since the advent of the internet as everything is already there and in place to make it much easer to program them on a massive scale. My first experience of the wide scale nature of this phenomenon was in the early 1970s when almost overnight television stations changed from televising mostly game shows and old movies to pushing news full on. As news became the new 'paradigm' for judging ratings it meant that hyping up the news became commonplace—the more sensational news stories became the higher up the ratings went. This continued to escalate to the situation we now have, that is where TV stations regularly interrupt programs with news headlines and news grabs. As these interruptions have to be short, making them sensational and thus more memorable became quite an art form. (Of course, as sleazy tabloids also played out similar themes it became increasingly difficult to escape such practices.) At the same time, good news reporters and news anchors became thin on the ground (because of stations' new policies, through their dilution in the new news cycle, and the new breed having different ethics to the previous generation). Excellent reporters such as Ed Murrow (and his 'Murrow Boys') and anchors like Walter Cronkite who knew how to balance the news eventually disappeared, so by the time the internet came along that priming to which you refer was ready grow exponentially. [For those not acquainted to news as it once was (and as a reality check), here are several of Ed Murrow's broadcasts (there are many more on the web and I'd urge you to listen to a sample of them). I apologize in advance if the second one offends or upsets anyone as the subject matter is horrible but I've included it to illustrate how dramatically news reporting has changed over the past 70 or so years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3qpgfH5imA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3qpgfH5imA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ffpIHnuaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ffpIHnuaw ] "people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way." Right, that's why those in charge of media organizations have the important responsibility to present news objectively and not sensationally (unfortunately, in the competition for resources the dollar has won out big-time over ethics). When I was at school, we were taught how to debate, and along with this training, we learned the critical difference between rhetoric and fact and how to tell them apart. From our class the teacher would select two teams at random and they would debate a proposition provided by the teacher. The proposition could be factual, fiction or hearsay, or some theoretical possibility: 'There is no such thing as a black swan' and 'Life exists both on earth and elsewhere in the universe' being two such examples. The teacher then assigned one team to argue in the affirmative and the other in the negative (the teams had no say or choice in which way they had to argue). At the end of the debate the remainder of the class voted on which team won the debate and that was then followed by an analysis of what had taken place—both the remaining class and debaters had to separate rhetoric from supported fact, figure out subject from predicate, and so on. At later debates, the teacher would allow teams to debate topics that they actually believed or disbelieved but the same analytical process would follow afterwards. I reckon my early debating experience at high school is the reason why I found my later encounter with the formal debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus at university so interesting, as I quickly realized that the debating techniques that we'd been taught at school were essentially the same as those that Socrates had used against his opponent. What's very important to realize here is that we don't need university-level logic to teach kids how to develop decent 'bullshit' filtering techniques—techniques that they can then apply throughout life. Moreover, the subject can be made interesting for kids: casting Thrasymachus as a selfish villain who believes 'that justice is everyman for himself' and watching how Socrates not only systematically demolishes that premise but also counters it with the notion that 'justice is much more than just one's self-interest' , as it's not only interesting and can be used to teach kids about logic, rhetoric and false premises but also the narrative has a built-in moral dimension/argument that's essentially universal. I believe it's of fundamental importance that we provide kids with a solid grounding in these matters early on in their education so they can think logically and reason things out for themselves. Because, as we've seen from horrific events in the 1930s in Germany (and others), great swathes of even intelligent people can succumb to false argument and determined propaganda (and as we now know, good and concerted propaganda is extremely hard to resist). For the first two decades after WWII, it seems we attempted to get things right (witness the training kids at my school had (and my high school was nothing special, it was stock-standard ordinary and typical of many others)). Unfortunately, in recent decades, and at a time when it's needed more than ever, such training seems to have fallen by the wayside. I'm not sure how we should now tackle the problem either—given that most kids will have experienced and grown used to the internet long before they'll ever get any training in logic, rhetoric, etc. (that is if they ever manage do so at all).

gnagatomo 6y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala_hijack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala_hijack

hilbert42 6y ago
Yeah, exactly. And my amygdala is over sensitive and I wish I had a gain control fitted to it so that I could turn it down occasionally. (Anyway, at least I know it's prone to over-sensitivity, and that's somewhat helpful. ;-) )

ex_amazon_sde 6y ago

Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. But also decades of materialism and "me me me" culture: I think people learn to follow their desires no-matter-what when buying goods or services and the same emotional mechanism is transferred into "buying in" an idea. Modern advertising and branding is based on emotion and vague ideas. The same algorithms to target online ads have been used to influence politics (see cambridge analytica). > stances that lay outside dogmatic groupthink Yes, but with a caveat: an idea can be labeled "groupthink" and "too political" as a tactic to dismiss it easily.

sangnoir 6y ago
> Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking. Way before social media, there was short wave radio, then cable news which introduced the 24-hour news cycle, and entertainment-shows-disguised-as-news with their permanently outraged talking heads (think Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson). Political polarization is older than social media, and it wasn't emergent - it was a deliberate political tactic and it worked well enough until the other side adopted it too. It's like an iterated prisoner's dilemma and both sides are now locked into a cycle of defecting - doing otherwise makes no sense, and there aren't many deescalation off-ramps.
- ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
  > Political polarization is older than social media Yes, it was widely reported in debates in ancient Athens and the Roman empire. But I wrote "Social media did a lot to foster outrage and destroy nuanced thinking.", which is different. Humanity has never seen before a billion-dollar industry generating user engagement by fueling online altercation. Instant gratification, dopamine cycle addiction and all of that.
  - scruple 6y ago
    Maybe there should be IRB-style oversight for Twitter, etc..., to tweak their algorithms. They are, after all, experimenting on humans here.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      Literally any change would count as "an experiment". Not just for algorithims but for "do people like to buy this new product". Saying there should be limited changes of algorithms is a popular "hot take" but it fundamentally doesn't make any goddamned sense. Human experiments being activities defined by the subject instead of the object make more sense. Can you have the human-involved experiment with just the objects occur naturally? You cannot just leave the props lying around a college campus and get a Milgram's experiment replication attempt. You cannot just have a freezing chamber or scalpels to repeat the horrors of nazi Germany and Unit 731.

froh 6y ago

Sometimes I wonder if this mechanism (another post referred to "amygdala hijack") makes concepts like personal gender pronouns and similar "correct and incorrect speech" concepts so delicate. get me right, language is deliberately abused to exercise power, to belittle others, by deliberately misgendering them or deliberately not using their academic title, etc. However if I want to have a conversation about something of importance and my conversation participant is not there yet, should I not ignore misgendering or omission of academic titles or similar heckling from their side, simply to get into a conversation about the topic proper, and then, should the conversation participant surprisingly evolve into a conversation partner, then ask about pronouns, or academic title, or whichever language convention I prefer? Why do I say this? If the other participant does not intend to evolve into a conversation partner, they will for lack of a better term jack off on heckling on the wrong pronoun or title or whatever it is that I may be asking for. I will never get to the core of what I want to discuss with that participant. > people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way. Or people have forgotten how to have a proper conversation, an engaged dialogue about topics they disagree on, at least in parts.

hilbert42 6y ago

"people have been programmed, on a massive scale, to react emotionally to certain learned key phrases and terms.' You're right about that and it scares me, especially so since the advent of the internet as everything is already there and in place to make it much easer to program them on a massive scale. My first experience of the wide scale nature of this phenomenon was in the early 1970s when almost overnight television stations changed from televising mostly game shows and old movies to pushing news full on. As news became the new 'paradigm' for judging ratings it meant that hyping up the news became commonplace—the more sensational news stories became the higher up the ratings went. This continued to escalate to the situation we now have, that is where TV stations regularly interrupt programs with news headlines and news grabs. As these interruptions have to be short, making them sensational and thus more memorable became quite an art form. (Of course, as sleazy tabloids also played out similar themes it became increasingly difficult to escape such practices.) At the same time, good news reporters and news anchors became thin on the ground (because of stations' new policies, through their dilution in the new news cycle, and the new breed having different ethics to the previous generation). Excellent reporters such as Ed Murrow (and his 'Murrow Boys') and anchors like Walter Cronkite who knew how to balance the news eventually disappeared, so by the time the internet came along that priming to which you refer was ready grow exponentially. [For those not acquainted to news as it once was (and as a reality check), here are several of Ed Murrow's broadcasts (there are many more on the web and I'd urge you to listen to a sample of them). I apologize in advance if the second one offends or upsets anyone as the subject matter is horrible but I've included it to illustrate how dramatically news reporting has changed over the past 70 or so years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3qpgfH5imA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3qpgfH5imA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ffpIHnuaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8ffpIHnuaw ] "people want to be told what to think, not how to think, as it's much easier that way." Right, that's why those in charge of media organizations have the important responsibility to present news objectively and not sensationally (unfortunately, in the competition for resources the dollar has won out big-time over ethics). When I was at school, we were taught how to debate, and along with this training, we learned the critical difference between rhetoric and fact and how to tell them apart. From our class the teacher would select two teams at random and they would debate a proposition provided by the teacher. The proposition could be factual, fiction or hearsay, or some theoretical possibility: 'There is no such thing as a black swan' and 'Life exists both on earth and elsewhere in the universe' being two such examples. The teacher then assigned one team to argue in the affirmative and the other in the negative (the teams had no say or choice in which way they had to argue). At the end of the debate the remainder of the class voted on which team won the debate and that was then followed by an analysis of what had taken place—both the remaining class and debaters had to separate rhetoric from supported fact, figure out subject from predicate, and so on. At later debates, the teacher would allow teams to debate topics that they actually believed or disbelieved but the same analytical process would follow afterwards. I reckon my early debating experience at high school is the reason why I found my later encounter with the formal debate between Socrates and Thrasymachus at university so interesting, as I quickly realized that the debating techniques that we'd been taught at school were essentially the same as those that Socrates had used against his opponent. What's very important to realize here is that we don't need university-level logic to teach kids how to develop decent 'bullshit' filtering techniques—techniques that they can then apply throughout life. Moreover, the subject can be made interesting for kids: casting Thrasymachus as a selfish villain who believes 'that justice is everyman for himself' and watching how Socrates not only systematically demolishes that premise but also counters it with the notion that 'justice is much more than just one's self-interest' , as it's not only interesting and can be used to teach kids about logic, rhetoric and false premises but also the narrative has a built-in moral dimension/argument that's essentially universal. I believe it's of fundamental importance that we provide kids with a solid grounding in these matters early on in their education so they can think logically and reason things out for themselves. Because, as we've seen from horrific events in the 1930s in Germany (and others), great swathes of even intelligent people can succumb to false argument and determined propaganda (and as we now know, good and concerted propaganda is extremely hard to resist). For the first two decades after WWII, it seems we attempted to get things right (witness the training kids at my school had (and my high school was nothing special, it was stock-standard ordinary and typical of many others)). Unfortunately, in recent decades, and at a time when it's needed more than ever, such training seems to have fallen by the wayside. I'm not sure how we should now tackle the problem either—given that most kids will have experienced and grown used to the internet long before they'll ever get any training in logic, rhetoric, etc. (that is if they ever manage do so at all).