6 ms·

The real question is why have we engineered our environment so unhealthy choices are so easy to make. There are systemic issues here that go beyond individual c

The real question is why have we engineered our environment so unhealthy choices are so easy to make. There are systemic issues here that go beyond individual choices. Social media is also part of the equation and we are now seeing the kind of damage it is doing to the epistemic commons. Everyone believes whatever they want to, safely cocooned in their own media echo chambers. The longer this state of affairs persists the worse things will get. Inability to deal with a pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg. It's great that this doctor can share his experience but why is he posting this on Reddit? Why isn't this information available from trusted media sources? And for that matter, why aren't there any such trusted sources that everyone can agree is acting in their best interests and providing them with worthwhile and pertinent news? Democracies can not survive without functional news and media sources.

chrsig 5y ago
> It's great that this doctor can share his experience but why is he posting this on Reddit? Because doctors are people, and they just wanted to get the experience off their chest without any personally identifying information being disclosed?
- informationally 5y ago
  It's possible to send anonymous tips to reporters. It's not hard. All he's doing with this story is farming fake internet points on Reddit. Getting something off his chest is not changing the systemic causes that made the situation he's currently in. If anything, he's actually exasperating the issue by having chosen to take this to Reddit instead of some trusted media outlet.
  - Bud 5y ago
    Actually, we already know he's doing more than "farming fake internet points", don't we? Because the story has now been posted here. Exacerbating, btw.
  - chrsig 5y ago
    They're not obligated to do any of that, you know. And it's ok that they're not. They didn't frame the post as something that should be bringing about any change. It's literally just a person sharing their story to get a sympathetic ear. Because sometimes humans need that to keep going.
  - jacquesc 5y ago
    I've read this same story over and over in the trusted media outlets. Here's one of many: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-08-17/vaccinated-covid-doctor-shot https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-08-17/vaccinated-...
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    Why would they want to take it to a media outlet where it has an even greater chance of getting out ? Reddits fits a niche blog like culture that allows the out-letting of emotions. Stuff like this are exactly why blogs even exist in the first place.
  - tsol 5y ago
    This story has be reported many times, the Atlantic has a story about medical professionals leaving the profession recently
- hirako2000 5y ago
  or it's simply a political post in disguise on reddit, like we can find all over forums since the pandemic became so political.
  - informationally 5y ago
    Correct, how do we even know this guy is an actual doctor? Maybe he's some insane person that enjoys collecting internet points.
    - rebuilder 5y ago
      We can’t know, but a cursory glance at the user’s post history shows that this isn’t some fly-by troll. They’ve been pretty consistent for a long time.
    - chrsig 5y ago
      You don't. You can either proceed to converse taking that they are on faith (and a consistent comment history over time), or not. You're not going to get satisfying confirmation one way or another. A conversation centered around the identity of the person is much less interesting than a conversation about the contents of their post.
      - mmcgaha 5y ago
        The mention of Q is what makes me think it is fake. My whole family is conservative; I have a German friend who is way out in right field (I love her but she is coo coo for coco pops), and I work with folks who most would consider fringe right. Not a single one of them have ever mentioned Q in a positive manner. As far as I can tell Q is an internet hoax. Yes I know there are people online who say they follow Q, but I just don't know anyone and I only hear about it on the internet.
        t-writescode 5y ago
        if you read their comment history, you'll see they're a regular on Q stuff, and the subreddit it's on is QanonCasualties, so it's not weird for them to bring up Q at all.
rektide 5y ago
I have a different feel that society simply does not condition people to involve themselves in the world. Society has become a teeter-totter of concern, a cycle of advancing to not having to care to suffering the ruin of having forgott4en what was so hard earned. I can only paraphrase the top quote, for I don't remember it nor who said it, but here's some related concerns, > 'Society's advancement is measured by that which it may take for granted' I forgot! Help! (until it cant/that fails) > "Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet." -Aldous Huxley > "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members." -Mahatma Ghandi But this sometimes requires not just aiding them, treating them well, but re-socializing them, re-educating them, informing them, breaking them out of their ignorance & failings. To simply say that we must > [re-]"engineer our environments so unhealthy choices are [not] so easy to make" feels a folly to me. We must socialize. We must foster an aware, awake, able society. Striving to simply prevent all faults is not how we achieve success; it results in a vision of domineering & the absolute & fixedness: it bespeaks a belief that there is one true path for society & that we need only set it out & all will walk this course. It's singular utopian, a singular destiny, not a polytopia, not letting us many people discover & hunt for our own ends. Imo society must remain a dialectic, a conversation, a hunt. We must encourage growth & awareness & hunts for meaning, without insisting on a systematic & singular top choice. I don't think social media is a part of this question: > "Everyone believes whatever they want to," is a false Boogeyman, a false god, a Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD), meant to scare us. We have to allow plurality, we have to allow polytopianism, we have to allow many systems, many beliefs. But we can still in aggregate steer towards informed, towards good beliefs, towards healthy ends. Trying to demonize the availability of voices & options- "safetly cocooned in their own social media echo chambers"- just misses the real point: that society doesn't have a progressive vision at large, that basically no one has a real bead on a healthy, progressive, gainful society. Everything is beset by conflict, and we are trying to make choices with very biased, limited, local regards. And there are very few clear paths, very few regardable winners. For sure, much of what presented in the world is faulty & awful. But this too feels like a part of evolution. Simply wishing for authoritarianism, for everyone to make the right choices, for everyone to accept good dogma in the place of bad dogma: it's a disaster. And I don't think "Everyone believes whatever they want to", I think they have complex experiences which shape what they are most susceptible to, and I think most of us lack good positive role models & experiences to shape us properly forward. The world does not reward the just & righteous, it doesn't promote the healthy: it showcases greed & taking & exploitation, it showcases narcisim & delusion. It shows us an all too recent history of medical abuse & experimentation of our minorities. These aren't social media problems, these are the actual world: the actual evidence of the actual world is unclear, is deeply shadowy, is ghastly. "The longer this state of affairs persists the worse things will get". Such appeal to authority & Fear. Such terror!!! "Inability to deal with a pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg" it itself a promise of horror & terror, it insists on & demands we obey or conform, & demands that anything else we do, any other permissiveness we permit only Immenatizes the Eschaton. To me, this high capitol fear uncertainty & doubt is the chief Immenatizing of the Eschaton there is. I don't like what people pick. I think people are incredibly stupid & full of shit. But I don't see that conformity & authority are the reagents here, I don't see that a more structured society that informs what decisions we must make will help. I believe society from the top needs to demonstrate better health, needs to make better choices easier to pick, needs to make better icons & references we can respect, that will inform what choices we freely make. Right now society simply lacks meaning. That social media is out there making it complicated is merely incidental, a scape goat, a convenient anti-authority to blame this all upon, but authority itself is shit, useless, cowards, good for nothing, and no one respects it, rightfully. Make a social contract worth believing in, society. Arden authoritarianism is far worse than the too many choices of the very very young ur-connected world we have recently arrived at. We do need to surface & democratize better choice-making, create better supporting info-networks & options of choice. But recognize first that the 4th age information society is very young, and that simply wishing to stuff it back in the bottle/box, blaming it, & being upset we don't do better is not going to help. And recognize that there are so many 1st 2nd & 3rd age society problems still dogging us, still making things enormously difficult, and recognize that those need remedy & addressal to before society can ever really right itself & find progress. Fearing pop-culture society, it's superficial glam, is a misdeed: what is really weak is society itself, is the unhelpful, unprogressive, un-gainful world that has failed to create better circumstances. I don't blame the people. I don't think we must outmanuever people, to make unhealthy choices impossible/harder. To me, it's less about trying to fight against the baleful/evil, and more about creating the construtive/positive. Social media will spread the good too, will snuff out the darkness, if we have it, if there's the sunlight to spread.
BLKNSLVR 5y ago
> The real question is why have we engineered our environment so unhealthy choices are so easy to make. The combination of freedom, capitalism, and greed. This is why I can't be entirely sure that China's approach isn't potentially longer term sustainable, as much as I disagree with it - it might actually be a better way to deal with the stubborn-ness of stupidity that's so inherent to humanity (to be fair, all these traits must have served us well when Pringles and Pop Tarts weren't cheap and easily available). Cigarettes. How did they become a thing? What, ever, was their redeeming feature? At least Pringles and Pop Tarts taste nice. Social media is just a more-efficient distillation of what traditional media has profited from since it began. It's not new human-hacking, it's just an efficiency bump that's actually more facilitated by the internet and pocket-portable devices with access to it.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > The combination of freedom, capitalism, and greed. Really? Last I heard, life expectancy in the USSR was quite a bit worse. > Cigarettes. How did they become a thing? Nicotine. Not hard at all to understand. Personally, I've always liked the smell of cigarettes. I never smoked, because I knew I'd really like it. Cigars, though, make me want to puke. > deal with the stubborn-ness of stupidity that's so inherent to humanity Most evil in the world is not perpetrated by evil people, but by good people believing they know what's best for everyone else, and forcing it on them.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    > Nicotine. Not hard at all to understand. Also monoamine oxidase inhibitors, a class of compounds that are effective against depression, panic disorder, and social phobia. Some think that the absence of the MAO inhibitors are why nicotine replacement therapies (gum, patches) aren't really all that great at getting people to stop smoking.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Was life expectancy in eastern block states worse if you correct for wealth? They had pretty good doctors as far as I know.

chrsig 5y ago

> It's great that this doctor can share his experience but why is he posting this on Reddit? Because doctors are people, and they just wanted to get the experience off their chest without any personally identifying information being disclosed?

informationally 5y ago
It's possible to send anonymous tips to reporters. It's not hard. All he's doing with this story is farming fake internet points on Reddit. Getting something off his chest is not changing the systemic causes that made the situation he's currently in. If anything, he's actually exasperating the issue by having chosen to take this to Reddit instead of some trusted media outlet.
- Bud 5y ago
  Actually, we already know he's doing more than "farming fake internet points", don't we? Because the story has now been posted here. Exacerbating, btw.
- chrsig 5y ago
  They're not obligated to do any of that, you know. And it's ok that they're not. They didn't frame the post as something that should be bringing about any change. It's literally just a person sharing their story to get a sympathetic ear. Because sometimes humans need that to keep going.
- jacquesc 5y ago
  I've read this same story over and over in the trusted media outlets. Here's one of many: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-08-17/vaccinated-covid-doctor-shot https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-08-17/vaccinated-...
- Jcowell 5y ago
  Why would they want to take it to a media outlet where it has an even greater chance of getting out ? Reddits fits a niche blog like culture that allows the out-letting of emotions. Stuff like this are exactly why blogs even exist in the first place.
- tsol 5y ago
  This story has be reported many times, the Atlantic has a story about medical professionals leaving the profession recently
hirako2000 5y ago
or it's simply a political post in disguise on reddit, like we can find all over forums since the pandemic became so political.
- informationally 5y ago
  Correct, how do we even know this guy is an actual doctor? Maybe he's some insane person that enjoys collecting internet points.
  - rebuilder 5y ago
    We can’t know, but a cursory glance at the user’s post history shows that this isn’t some fly-by troll. They’ve been pretty consistent for a long time.
  - chrsig 5y ago
    You don't. You can either proceed to converse taking that they are on faith (and a consistent comment history over time), or not. You're not going to get satisfying confirmation one way or another. A conversation centered around the identity of the person is much less interesting than a conversation about the contents of their post.
    - mmcgaha 5y ago
      The mention of Q is what makes me think it is fake. My whole family is conservative; I have a German friend who is way out in right field (I love her but she is coo coo for coco pops), and I work with folks who most would consider fringe right. Not a single one of them have ever mentioned Q in a positive manner. As far as I can tell Q is an internet hoax. Yes I know there are people online who say they follow Q, but I just don't know anyone and I only hear about it on the internet.
      - t-writescode 5y ago
        if you read their comment history, you'll see they're a regular on Q stuff, and the subreddit it's on is QanonCasualties, so it's not weird for them to bring up Q at all.

rektide 5y ago

I have a different feel that society simply does not condition people to involve themselves in the world. Society has become a teeter-totter of concern, a cycle of advancing to not having to care to suffering the ruin of having forgott4en what was so hard earned. I can only paraphrase the top quote, for I don't remember it nor who said it, but here's some related concerns, > 'Society's advancement is measured by that which it may take for granted' I forgot! Help! (until it cant/that fails) > "Every gain made by individuals or societies is almost instantly taken for granted. The luminous ceiling toward which we raise our longing eyes becomes, when we have climbed to the next floor, a stretch of disregarded linoleum beneath our feet." -Aldous Huxley > "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats it's most vulnerable members." -Mahatma Ghandi But this sometimes requires not just aiding them, treating them well, but re-socializing them, re-educating them, informing them, breaking them out of their ignorance & failings. To simply say that we must > [re-]"engineer our environments so unhealthy choices are [not] so easy to make" feels a folly to me. We must socialize. We must foster an aware, awake, able society. Striving to simply prevent all faults is not how we achieve success; it results in a vision of domineering & the absolute & fixedness: it bespeaks a belief that there is one true path for society & that we need only set it out & all will walk this course. It's singular utopian, a singular destiny, not a polytopia, not letting us many people discover & hunt for our own ends. Imo society must remain a dialectic, a conversation, a hunt. We must encourage growth & awareness & hunts for meaning, without insisting on a systematic & singular top choice. I don't think social media is a part of this question: > "Everyone believes whatever they want to," is a false Boogeyman, a false god, a Fear Uncertainty & Doubt (FUD), meant to scare us. We have to allow plurality, we have to allow polytopianism, we have to allow many systems, many beliefs. But we can still in aggregate steer towards informed, towards good beliefs, towards healthy ends. Trying to demonize the availability of voices & options- "safetly cocooned in their own social media echo chambers"- just misses the real point: that society doesn't have a progressive vision at large, that basically no one has a real bead on a healthy, progressive, gainful society. Everything is beset by conflict, and we are trying to make choices with very biased, limited, local regards. And there are very few clear paths, very few regardable winners. For sure, much of what presented in the world is faulty & awful. But this too feels like a part of evolution. Simply wishing for authoritarianism, for everyone to make the right choices, for everyone to accept good dogma in the place of bad dogma: it's a disaster. And I don't think "Everyone believes whatever they want to", I think they have complex experiences which shape what they are most susceptible to, and I think most of us lack good positive role models & experiences to shape us properly forward. The world does not reward the just & righteous, it doesn't promote the healthy: it showcases greed & taking & exploitation, it showcases narcisim & delusion. It shows us an all too recent history of medical abuse & experimentation of our minorities. These aren't social media problems, these are the actual world: the actual evidence of the actual world is unclear, is deeply shadowy, is ghastly. "The longer this state of affairs persists the worse things will get". Such appeal to authority & Fear. Such terror!!! "Inability to deal with a pandemic is just the tip of the iceberg" it itself a promise of horror & terror, it insists on & demands we obey or conform, & demands that anything else we do, any other permissiveness we permit only Immenatizes the Eschaton. To me, this high capitol fear uncertainty & doubt is the chief Immenatizing of the Eschaton there is. I don't like what people pick. I think people are incredibly stupid & full of shit. But I don't see that conformity & authority are the reagents here, I don't see that a more structured society that informs what decisions we must make will help. I believe society from the top needs to demonstrate better health, needs to make better choices easier to pick, needs to make better icons & references we can respect, that will inform what choices we freely make. Right now society simply lacks meaning. That social media is out there making it complicated is merely incidental, a scape goat, a convenient anti-authority to blame this all upon, but authority itself is shit, useless, cowards, good for nothing, and no one respects it, rightfully. Make a social contract worth believing in, society. Arden authoritarianism is far worse than the too many choices of the very very young ur-connected world we have recently arrived at. We do need to surface & democratize better choice-making, create better supporting info-networks & options of choice. But recognize first that the 4th age information society is very young, and that simply wishing to stuff it back in the bottle/box, blaming it, & being upset we don't do better is not going to help. And recognize that there are so many 1st 2nd & 3rd age society problems still dogging us, still making things enormously difficult, and recognize that those need remedy & addressal to before society can ever really right itself & find progress. Fearing pop-culture society, it's superficial glam, is a misdeed: what is really weak is society itself, is the unhelpful, unprogressive, un-gainful world that has failed to create better circumstances. I don't blame the people. I don't think we must outmanuever people, to make unhealthy choices impossible/harder. To me, it's less about trying to fight against the baleful/evil, and more about creating the construtive/positive. Social media will spread the good too, will snuff out the darkness, if we have it, if there's the sunlight to spread.

BLKNSLVR 5y ago

> The real question is why have we engineered our environment so unhealthy choices are so easy to make. The combination of freedom, capitalism, and greed. This is why I can't be entirely sure that China's approach isn't potentially longer term sustainable, as much as I disagree with it - it might actually be a better way to deal with the stubborn-ness of stupidity that's so inherent to humanity (to be fair, all these traits must have served us well when Pringles and Pop Tarts weren't cheap and easily available). Cigarettes. How did they become a thing? What, ever, was their redeeming feature? At least Pringles and Pop Tarts taste nice. Social media is just a more-efficient distillation of what traditional media has profited from since it began. It's not new human-hacking, it's just an efficiency bump that's actually more facilitated by the internet and pocket-portable devices with access to it.

WalterBright 5y ago
> The combination of freedom, capitalism, and greed. Really? Last I heard, life expectancy in the USSR was quite a bit worse. > Cigarettes. How did they become a thing? Nicotine. Not hard at all to understand. Personally, I've always liked the smell of cigarettes. I never smoked, because I knew I'd really like it. Cigars, though, make me want to puke. > deal with the stubborn-ness of stupidity that's so inherent to humanity Most evil in the world is not perpetrated by evil people, but by good people believing they know what's best for everyone else, and forcing it on them.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  > Nicotine. Not hard at all to understand. Also monoamine oxidase inhibitors, a class of compounds that are effective against depression, panic disorder, and social phobia. Some think that the absence of the MAO inhibitors are why nicotine replacement therapies (gum, patches) aren't really all that great at getting people to stop smoking.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Was life expectancy in eastern block states worse if you correct for wealth? They had pretty good doctors as far as I know.