7 ms·

While I am a big fan of Jonathan Haidt, and have read several of his books, I can't help but feel that this is written from a point of view that is entirely too

While I am a big fan of Jonathan Haidt, and have read several of his books, I can't help but feel that this is written from a point of view that is entirely too impressed with (if also afraid of) technology. Peter Turchin predicted escalating levels of polarization in the US, reaching a peak around 2020, without any need to look at social media. The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's. I also think he's more impressed with AI-generated content than is warranted; unpaid zealots can crank the stuff out in more than enough quantity. Turchin blames elite overproduction; it seems a much more fundamental issue than social media. Haidt even provides evidence for that here: "These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society." Now, don't get me wrong, I am no fan of FB or Twitter, but I don't think Haidt's take on this is accurate. The stupidity of current discourse uses social media, of course, because that's the dominant media, but I don't believe they caused it.

zeruch 5y ago
"The stupidity of current discourse uses social media, of course, because that's the dominant media, but I don't believe they caused it. " And certainly based on past statements he's made, I took that the tech augmented the issue, but was not being posed as the root cause. Like you I think Turchin is on to something, but Haidt here is also largely pointing out a symptom that has immense influence in the current day. To that, I'm not sure if he is as much "afraid/impressed with tech" as much as pointing the human inability to think remotely (or even care most of the time) about laws of unintended consequences, let alone how to address them when they inevitably arise.
nr2x 5y ago
Facebook is mentioned 19 times, Fox News once, and talk radio zero. This is a very techno deterministic argument that utterly fails to acknowledge the main source of misinformation and division is boring old tech like cable news and radio. The main role Facebook serves is to make Fox and radio personalities more accessible.
- jdkee 5y ago
  Fox News and conservative talk radio have existed since the early 1990s yet the extreme polarization in American life didn't begin until ~2010, which appears to prove Haidt's point.
  - groby_b 5y ago
    Uh, no, it does not prove his point in any way. For that, he'd need to establish any causal link, which he utterly fails to do.
  - titzer 5y ago
    Fox News came about in 1996. I remember before that, there was just Rush and co, and they were fringe on the radio. Fox when mainstream in the early 2000s and just snowballed slowly ever since. There was never a moment where extreme polarization just suddenly appeared. Rush in the early 1990s was saying f-nut stuff back then, too.
    - pixl97 5y ago
      I do think the internet was required for the final acceleration into madness. In general commercial media is seeking ad dollars, even though its saying some crazy things it still has some limits. In addition, it has a limited number of guests and they tend to get limited to 'interesting' individuals. The internet is not limited in such a fashion and the echo chambers and feedback loops are faster.
      - supramouse 5y ago
        Well yeah, now you can't turn it off
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      Limbaugh was so "fringe on the radio" that they gave him a Monday Night Football announcer spot, at least until he had a predictable response to a black football player in a position traditionally played by white guys.
grapeskin 5y ago
> The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's. I know this is in the context of the build up to the civil war, but how much were neighbors at each other’s necks? I don’t know much about that period aside from the obvious events that followed (slavery being the huge and obvious motivator for the war), so I’m not sure how divided everybody was. But it seems like in the US today, the divide is spread across the entire country. Nearly everybody is aligned with either A or B group and agrees with nearly straight down the column with that group’s general viewpoints. Some areas lean A or B, but you’ll always have someone vehemently against the other group no matter where you go. I don’t think the US today would have a north-south divide so much as it would a political party divide.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  That Trump's pleas for his supporters to take the vaccine fell on deaf ears appears to indicate things aren't quite that clear cut. Perhaps some groups are more inclined to force compliance with all of their views than other groups.
  - titzer 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - wyldfire 5y ago
      I think it's just the idea of endorsing prophylactic medicine. Since anyone could be a potential victim of a virus, everyone should consider vaccination. And while it's not compulsory, the suggestion that it be widely advocated sets the conspiracy folks on edge. They seem to pin their identity on { I'm not like the others + mistrust of authority }. So it's really easy to accept a message that the too-trusting have all fallen into a trap that they're too smart for. If it's not tracking, it's greed, or some other motive driving evildoers to vaccinate the world. Hydroxychloroquine was attractive because it was available before the vaccine and you would only need to administer it to the infected. Of course, a few did try to take it prophylactically and at least one OD'd. Trump is so purely and consistently self serving. He didn't promote the vaccine enough because he feared his successor would get the credit and he (rightly) feared his base would hold it against him. And he only promoted it when he realized that his supporters were dropping like flies and millions of the kids in the next generation will turn eighteen before the next presidential election. The vaccines are a triumph of humanity that should be celebrated. They were produced, tested and distributed very rapidly (among the wealthiest countries). We could stand to improve significantly at how well it was distributed to poorer nations. But IMO a positive story overall. And antivaxxers might have had reason to be cautious at first, but now it's so widely distributed that it doesn't make much sense to fear it anymore. the long term consequences of the infection are likely much much worse than the long term consequences of vaccination.
titzer 5y ago
I feel like Alvin Toffler was already onto something in Future Shock (1970). The modern world is just too interconnected and things are changing too fast. We're constantly thrust into ambiguous situations, exposed to a flood of information beyond our capacity to process, and grievances of the historical past pile up and rub against each other because there are no borders, no boundaries. Careers, ways of life, communities, everything just rent asunder. Overall, I think our ape reflexes are overwhelmed. No wonder so many of us start to descend into madness in our private, demon-haunted worlds, that Sagan wrote about. All of us are completely overcome by this never-ending torrent. There is no peace. On top of that, we've had a simmering culture war since before I was born. The volume on it has just got turned up all the way. People are, frankly, traumatized at every turn. And then, on top of that, technology is just shoveling this pile in your face constantly. Trying to get in every second of every day and get a slice of that sweet, sweet, attention economy. So they can dose it up with some advertising steroids to get you to buy, buy, watch, watch. Is it any wonder we are all nuts? We're being driven nuts!
- asdff 5y ago
  So much stress we have is stuff we just put upon ourselves. Oh man I better pick up or else my partner/parent/boss will scold me. I have to put on nice clothes to go out, I can't look like a slob. I am made to feel bad about how I look. I am forced to spend the day sitting and thinking instead of out foraging and using my legs and eyes. I have an insatiable need for ever more material goods thanks to the science of addiction being applied to marketing. I exist as a warmbody to generate disposable income for another to take, I merely hold currency transiently in its passage towards some inevitable black hole of wealth. IMO society is almost like this behavioral disease. It's no wonder we are so depressed, when it is so very different from what we have evolved to live by: a life of foraging, working on personal survival, and raising kin.
simonh 5y ago
> The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's In other words it could be worse, you could be in an actual full on civil war.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  ...give it time.
Uehreka 5y ago
I feel like I see a lot of HN/HN-adjacent (pg, his friends, etc) conversation about polarization and elite overproduction that totally misses the asymmetry between the left and the right. Like, sure, there are plenty of middle-to-upper-middle-class white liberals with “In This House We Believe” signs in their front yards. But while they may be culturally liberal, if you poll them on Medicare for All, wealth taxes, putting workers on corporate boards, or a $15 minimum wage, you’ll probably find that the rich white people of America aren’t clamoring to do anything that would threaten the status of corporations of people with lots of property. However the people who are (like the Amazon workers who just unionized, or the diverse coalition behind Bernie’s campaigns) are more sympathetic than suburban white liberals, and don’t fit as nicely into the horseshoe shape. Meanwhile the Right is all in line on their agenda. The Right’s rich white folks aren’t worried about their masses voting against corporate interests, and they’ll happily sign off on whatever culture war issues it takes to keep the middle and working class parts of their constituency coming to the polls.
- rossdavidh 5y ago
  Having both progressive and conservative friends, I have to say that I see just as much division on the right nowadays, as on the left. Trump and Romney, for example, don't get along all that well. Christian conservatives and Tea Party activists have very different priorities on, for example, gay-marriage vs. big banks, and very different attitudes towards big corporations or many other topics. It was, for many years, true that the right was more cohesive than the left, but this seems very different in the last ten years.
freshhawk 5y ago
Elite overproduction does seem a much more sensible focus here. If you want to blame the internet, then the obvious path is the "shared story" angle. There was a single mainstream dominant narrative for a while, but it couldn't hold up to the public talking directly to each other all the time, it was too full of holes and too clearly mostly a bunch of bullshit (remember the internet era before these "turning points" was heavy on the 'debunking' stuff). So the elites are fighting over who gets to attempt to put in place the new official narrative (and many hope to make it a dominant narrative again but that seems far fetched to me). It seems ... very obvious. I guess the problem is that my story depends on the old narrative being a constructed untrue thing and that's too "unamerican" of me?

zeruch 5y ago

"The stupidity of current discourse uses social media, of course, because that's the dominant media, but I don't believe they caused it. " And certainly based on past statements he's made, I took that the tech augmented the issue, but was not being posed as the root cause. Like you I think Turchin is on to something, but Haidt here is also largely pointing out a symptom that has immense influence in the current day. To that, I'm not sure if he is as much "afraid/impressed with tech" as much as pointing the human inability to think remotely (or even care most of the time) about laws of unintended consequences, let alone how to address them when they inevitably arise.

nr2x 5y ago

Facebook is mentioned 19 times, Fox News once, and talk radio zero. This is a very techno deterministic argument that utterly fails to acknowledge the main source of misinformation and division is boring old tech like cable news and radio. The main role Facebook serves is to make Fox and radio personalities more accessible.

jdkee 5y ago
Fox News and conservative talk radio have existed since the early 1990s yet the extreme polarization in American life didn't begin until ~2010, which appears to prove Haidt's point.
- groby_b 5y ago
  Uh, no, it does not prove his point in any way. For that, he'd need to establish any causal link, which he utterly fails to do.
- titzer 5y ago
  Fox News came about in 1996. I remember before that, there was just Rush and co, and they were fringe on the radio. Fox when mainstream in the early 2000s and just snowballed slowly ever since. There was never a moment where extreme polarization just suddenly appeared. Rush in the early 1990s was saying f-nut stuff back then, too.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    I do think the internet was required for the final acceleration into madness. In general commercial media is seeking ad dollars, even though its saying some crazy things it still has some limits. In addition, it has a limited number of guests and they tend to get limited to 'interesting' individuals. The internet is not limited in such a fashion and the echo chambers and feedback loops are faster.
    - supramouse 5y ago
      Well yeah, now you can't turn it off
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Limbaugh was so "fringe on the radio" that they gave him a Monday Night Football announcer spot, at least until he had a predictable response to a black football player in a position traditionally played by white guys.

grapeskin 5y ago

> The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's. I know this is in the context of the build up to the civil war, but how much were neighbors at each other’s necks? I don’t know much about that period aside from the obvious events that followed (slavery being the huge and obvious motivator for the war), so I’m not sure how divided everybody was. But it seems like in the US today, the divide is spread across the entire country. Nearly everybody is aligned with either A or B group and agrees with nearly straight down the column with that group’s general viewpoints. Some areas lean A or B, but you’ll always have someone vehemently against the other group no matter where you go. I don’t think the US today would have a north-south divide so much as it would a political party divide.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
That Trump's pleas for his supporters to take the vaccine fell on deaf ears appears to indicate things aren't quite that clear cut. Perhaps some groups are more inclined to force compliance with all of their views than other groups.
- titzer 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - wyldfire 5y ago
    I think it's just the idea of endorsing prophylactic medicine. Since anyone could be a potential victim of a virus, everyone should consider vaccination. And while it's not compulsory, the suggestion that it be widely advocated sets the conspiracy folks on edge. They seem to pin their identity on { I'm not like the others + mistrust of authority }. So it's really easy to accept a message that the too-trusting have all fallen into a trap that they're too smart for. If it's not tracking, it's greed, or some other motive driving evildoers to vaccinate the world. Hydroxychloroquine was attractive because it was available before the vaccine and you would only need to administer it to the infected. Of course, a few did try to take it prophylactically and at least one OD'd. Trump is so purely and consistently self serving. He didn't promote the vaccine enough because he feared his successor would get the credit and he (rightly) feared his base would hold it against him. And he only promoted it when he realized that his supporters were dropping like flies and millions of the kids in the next generation will turn eighteen before the next presidential election. The vaccines are a triumph of humanity that should be celebrated. They were produced, tested and distributed very rapidly (among the wealthiest countries). We could stand to improve significantly at how well it was distributed to poorer nations. But IMO a positive story overall. And antivaxxers might have had reason to be cautious at first, but now it's so widely distributed that it doesn't make much sense to fear it anymore. the long term consequences of the infection are likely much much worse than the long term consequences of vaccination.

titzer 5y ago

I feel like Alvin Toffler was already onto something in Future Shock (1970). The modern world is just too interconnected and things are changing too fast. We're constantly thrust into ambiguous situations, exposed to a flood of information beyond our capacity to process, and grievances of the historical past pile up and rub against each other because there are no borders, no boundaries. Careers, ways of life, communities, everything just rent asunder. Overall, I think our ape reflexes are overwhelmed. No wonder so many of us start to descend into madness in our private, demon-haunted worlds, that Sagan wrote about. All of us are completely overcome by this never-ending torrent. There is no peace. On top of that, we've had a simmering culture war since before I was born. The volume on it has just got turned up all the way. People are, frankly, traumatized at every turn. And then, on top of that, technology is just shoveling this pile in your face constantly. Trying to get in every second of every day and get a slice of that sweet, sweet, attention economy. So they can dose it up with some advertising steroids to get you to buy, buy, watch, watch. Is it any wonder we are all nuts? We're being driven nuts!

asdff 5y ago
So much stress we have is stuff we just put upon ourselves. Oh man I better pick up or else my partner/parent/boss will scold me. I have to put on nice clothes to go out, I can't look like a slob. I am made to feel bad about how I look. I am forced to spend the day sitting and thinking instead of out foraging and using my legs and eyes. I have an insatiable need for ever more material goods thanks to the science of addiction being applied to marketing. I exist as a warmbody to generate disposable income for another to take, I merely hold currency transiently in its passage towards some inevitable black hole of wealth. IMO society is almost like this behavioral disease. It's no wonder we are so depressed, when it is so very different from what we have evolved to live by: a life of foraging, working on personal survival, and raising kin.

simonh 5y ago

> The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the late 1850's In other words it could be worse, you could be in an actual full on civil war.

rossdavidh 5y ago
...give it time.

Uehreka 5y ago

I feel like I see a lot of HN/HN-adjacent (pg, his friends, etc) conversation about polarization and elite overproduction that totally misses the asymmetry between the left and the right. Like, sure, there are plenty of middle-to-upper-middle-class white liberals with “In This House We Believe” signs in their front yards. But while they may be culturally liberal, if you poll them on Medicare for All, wealth taxes, putting workers on corporate boards, or a $15 minimum wage, you’ll probably find that the rich white people of America aren’t clamoring to do anything that would threaten the status of corporations of people with lots of property. However the people who are (like the Amazon workers who just unionized, or the diverse coalition behind Bernie’s campaigns) are more sympathetic than suburban white liberals, and don’t fit as nicely into the horseshoe shape. Meanwhile the Right is all in line on their agenda. The Right’s rich white folks aren’t worried about their masses voting against corporate interests, and they’ll happily sign off on whatever culture war issues it takes to keep the middle and working class parts of their constituency coming to the polls.

rossdavidh 5y ago
Having both progressive and conservative friends, I have to say that I see just as much division on the right nowadays, as on the left. Trump and Romney, for example, don't get along all that well. Christian conservatives and Tea Party activists have very different priorities on, for example, gay-marriage vs. big banks, and very different attitudes towards big corporations or many other topics. It was, for many years, true that the right was more cohesive than the left, but this seems very different in the last ten years.

freshhawk 5y ago

Elite overproduction does seem a much more sensible focus here. If you want to blame the internet, then the obvious path is the "shared story" angle. There was a single mainstream dominant narrative for a while, but it couldn't hold up to the public talking directly to each other all the time, it was too full of holes and too clearly mostly a bunch of bullshit (remember the internet era before these "turning points" was heavy on the 'debunking' stuff). So the elites are fighting over who gets to attempt to put in place the new official narrative (and many hope to make it a dominant narrative again but that seems far fetched to me). It seems ... very obvious. I guess the problem is that my story depends on the old narrative being a constructed untrue thing and that's too "unamerican" of me?