21 ms·

Reality is just a game now

• mbfg 4y ago
  Asking questions that are claims and demanding yes/no answers is irrational. The valid form is how courts work, you make a claim, and then either agree with the claim or disagree with claim. So valid answers are yes, and not convinced of yes, or no and not convinced of no. But that is two separate claims, So valid questions are Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese laboratory? Convinced or not Convinced. Covid-19 did not escape from a Chinese laboratory? Convinced or not Convinced.
• CRConrad 4y ago
  From TFA: > To play an alternate reality game is to be drawn into a collaborative project of explaining the world. It is to lose, even fleetingly, one’s commitment to what is most true in the service of what is most compelling, what most advances a narrative one deeply believes. (Or at least wants to believe.) I do that, sometimes, quite quite consciously and even intentionally. In SF circles, it's called "suspension of disbelief".
• mintaka5 4y ago
• brooklyndude 4y ago
  Missed the most obvious outcome. We are in a VR simulation. We see more “clues” everyday. Now how to work within the VR world handed to us. That’s the next steps. Soon to become apparent I’m sure.
  • ABraidotti 4y ago
    Your conclusion exemplifies the essay's argument that we pick facts that confirm our most compelling narrative.
  • lm28469 4y ago
    > obvious How so ?
    • j_k_eter 4y ago
      Countless people have seen past the veil and lived to tell about it. Until now, the mainstream of the developed world has provided a strong inoculation against any such views spreading - namely, that it can be safely and instantaneous disregarded as mental illness. No further inquiry necessary. That's the part that's about to begin changing. Slowly at first, as people like Kanye West come to realize they've been gas-lit. I expect this change to pick up steam though I can't guess the rate right now. HN will be the last dark dominion of Left-Hemisphere-Dominance to be dragged, demanding citations and invoking logical fallacies all the way, into the present.
      • dbsmith83 4y ago
        > HN will be the last dark dominion of Left-Hemisphere-Dominance to be dragged, demanding citations and invoking logical fallacies all the way, into the present. Thanks for giving me a good chuckle this morning! God, this place is great.
      • lm28469 4y ago
        I can read your words but I have no idea what your point is
      • mistermann 4y ago
        > Until now, the mainstream of the developed world has provided a strong inoculation against any such views spreading - namely, that it can be safely and instantaneous disregarded as mental illness. No further inquiry necessary. Too true. > That's the part that's about to begin changing. Agree...it is becoming more and more common on the internet (in varying forms), and appearing in places where it would have been formerly rejected outright. > Slowly at first, as people like Kanye West come to realize they've been gas-lit. I expect this change to pick up steam though I can't guess the rate right now. The rate is not necessarily a costant - for example, if a catalyst was to appear on the scene, the rate of change could take on a much more steep upward trajectory (for good or for ill). > HN will be the last dark dominion of Left-Hemisphere-Dominance to be dragged, demanding citations and invoking logical fallacies all the way, into the present. My intuition strongly suggests your intuition is right...but then this sort of thing can be taken into consideration.
  • sprkwd 4y ago
    If I’m in a VR simulation, why on earth did I wish to be me? Wouldn’t wish that on anybody.
    • Traubenfuchs 4y ago
      Maybe our real personas are into the challenge? Or the fresh inspiration of feeling pain? Imagine being a painless immortal -spending 80 years in one of our dying bodies might be fun to us.
      • guerrilla 4y ago
        This was Alan Watts' final religion actually; literally that.
    • mbg721 4y ago
      Being in a simulation doesn't necessarily imply that you're there by choice.
    • varjag 4y ago
      Wish…? You're enduring a punishment!
    • marginalia_nu 4y ago
      I always liked this thought experiment, as outlined by Alan Watts: > Let's suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power to dream in one night 75 years' worth of time. > Or any length of time you wanted to have. > And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes. > You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. > And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say > 'Well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise. > Let's have a dream which isn't under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be.' > And you would dig that, and come out of it and say 'That was a close shave, now wasn't it?' > Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream, and finally, you would dream where you are now. > You would dream of the life that you are actually living in today. > That would be within the infinite multiplicity of the choices you would have. > Of playing that you weren't God. Because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he's not. > The first thing that he says to himself is 'Man, get lost,' because he gives himself away. > The nature of love is self-abandonment, not clinging to oneself. > Throwing yourself out, for instance as in basketball; you're always getting rid of the ball. > You say to the other fellow 'Have a ball.' See? And that keeps things moving. That's the nature of life.
  • implements 4y ago
    What’s the difference between a VR simulation and a Divine Creation, though? - Both are synthesised realities contingent on the patronage of some kind of administrative creator.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• Philorandroid 4y ago
  Pretty salient article, even if it felt like it hyperfixated on the low-hanging QAnon fruit, and not more controversial examples of perverted/wishfully-thought reality. Well-worth a second read!
• eterevsky 4y ago
  I got "don't know" for 3 of these questions and "it's complicated" for further 2 and "probably no" for 2 more. How can you give definite answers for factual questions in which you don't have full information?
  • andy_ppp 4y ago
    The game is you're expected to arrive at the most extreme political ideology so you can to remain relevant on social media...? Seriously though, I sent the article to my Dad as he seems to believe everything is a conspiracy theory; the EU is a German project to win the Second World War (I know), climate change is made up by governments for some reasons and a plucky band of fossil fuel companies and right wing bloggers have uncovered the truth, the war in Ukraine is The West trying to sell arms and it's their fault for inviting Ukraine into NATO (which hasn't happened AFAIK?)... you get the idea. We live in a time described excellently by the article even if you are not the target of it's point, the fact that this conspiracy-theory-isation of society exists and an extremely high percentage of people seems to be playing it to some extent.
    • j_k_eter 4y ago
      Plz tell your dad if he ever wants to grab a non-alcoholic beer and vent about you, I'm down. I'm kidding of course. He and I would be able to talk for days about other things, though. You and I, true to the OP, would probably rate each other not worth each other's time after 5 seconds. This is the inoculation I spoke of in my other comment. It's a powerful mechanism. "Do you know who owns and controls the station you're watching? Does the truth you know rely on its funding? Does it matter? DOES IT MATTER?!?" --kmfdm
      • andy_ppp 4y ago
        You’re not kidding are you. I think you’ve misunderstood the point of the article and started playing the game it talks about in the comments. Well played.
      • sophacles 4y ago
• frgtpsswrdlame 4y ago
  One thing I think the article maybe misses. I love playing Civilization but when I play, I rarely win militarily, or in fact, at all. Instead I just build up and up and up until my winning feels like a foregone conclusion and then I quit and start a new game. Building up and up and up is fun. But actually building a huge military and marching it through my enemies and taking over is really slow and kind of a slog actually. I see a similar dynamic going on online, over on twitter and stuff. I think many people think those people who enter their online filter bubbles and rarely leave do so because they know their worldview is fragile or they're afraid to be proven wrong or whatever but actually it's primarily just that being inside the filter bubble and slowly building an argument that you just know will crush your enemies is really fun and actually leaving the bubble to go do that crushing isn't that fun, it's kind of a slog actually. Anyways it points to at least one technological mitigating factor, which is that the engagement with those opposite you needs to be gamified in a similar way to make it more appealing to more people. Going on twitter or reddit and openly disagreeing with someone inside their bubble means I'm likely to soon be arguing with about 12 different people who all disagree with me, often in different ways (very unfair/unfun to fight on a dozen fronts) or going 30 comments deep with someone (you can never actually win so there is no reward.) I think technology has found a lot of easy wins in creating engagement by building bubbles but all the things we really want to do with those bubbles - merge them, pop them, slowly dissipate them, transplant them, etc. still remain unsolved problems. And since the article asked: 1. T 2. T 3. F 4. F 5. IDK/C 6. F 7. F
  • sillyapple 4y ago
    I don't know how to win at Civ without destroying all the AIs better than me militarily.
• alexpotato 4y ago
  Back in the mid 90's as the Internet was starting to become more accessible to the general public, I remember reading an article that made the following point: The telegraph effectively killed many newspapers as everyone moved to newspapers to printed national and global news. That was bad b/c it lowered the options people had for consuming news and dramatically reduced the diversity of ideas and opinions. The Internet was going to do the same to the point that we all read the same big websites and therefore had the same thoughts, opinions etc. <end of the point> I remember reading this and thinking "that kind of makes sense". Revisiting the idea recently, Pandora, YouTube, TikTok etc have all made a business out of building a customized feed for YOU. It's become the exact opposite of what the original article predicted. It's not surprising that we've become so divided when you can "build" your own reality by choosing the information streams that you want to consume. PS In terms of mass media shared experiences, 120 MILLION people watched the series finale of the TV show MASH. Hard to imagine a similar event today.
  • kingkawn 4y ago
    A teenager in my family says that all the kids in her high school have suspiciously similar senses of humor, as though that part of all of them was raised in the same environment; TikTok
  • pyinstallwoes 4y ago
    Well in one way it did work with the original point, the internet has created a centralized pipe for X. There exists not _many youtubes_ there is _one youtube_ and everyone uses that for video. In the beginning of the internet there were _many_ options, but overtime all of these options get cannabalized by a central _service_ for that thing. So yes and yes, which is arguably the closest thing to a matrix, simulacrum view of reality. On top of that we rely ever increasingly on models and statistics as physical laws. Oh woe to the future, for the difference between fact or fiction is irrelevant and blurred.
  • Swizec 4y ago
    We do all go to the same ~10 websites. There are some geographic differences, different sites dominate in different parts of the world. America has an outsized influence that may slowly be slipping. What you couldn’t predict 20 years ago is that those 10 websites are going to have ~personalized feeds for everyone. That was a little surprising … although we’ve been talking about the problem of filter bubbles since at least the mid 2000’s. I remember telling my boss in high school that I’m going to quit so I can go build a Google that doesn’t suffer from the filter bubble problem. Ah youth … Despite all this personalization, a collective conscience remains. Largely influenced by bot armies and professional memers. Look how effectively the news spreads when an american politician does anything. Especially around election season. The whole world knows and can’t get away. And we all know that GOT had a bad ending even if we stopped watching the show after 1 season, for example.
• swayvil 4y ago
  Here are 2 statements. See how they sit with you. Reality, beyond the local, unless you travel a lot, only exists as a media fiction. The bigger reality, the world beyond the local, is more important than the local. Because the bigger reality is bigger.
  • sph 4y ago
    The biggest lie media has sold us is that the "bigger reality" is more important. This is going to be extremely controversial to people that live on the internet like you and I, but what is actually important to you is what's in a one mile range from your current location, your family and your house. It's culturally accepted that being "cultured" to be interested in what's happening in the other side of the world, but it is not important as in vital for your well being and immediate survival. So, no. The local is what is more important, the rest is what makes us buy newspapers, TVs and radios. News is an product.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      I would not be surprised at all of the average American doesn't know the names of their neighbors, but can rattle off large numbers of "world figures" who basically have zero impact on them, and they certainly have zero impact on.
      • meltyness 4y ago
        Unfortunately, this IS some people's jobs, certainly the San Francisco Fed president reports on financial conditions conditions across the west, including LA, and Portland... how do those places look?
      • sph 4y ago
        I am not American, and I do not know my neighbour's name. I think it's terrible and sadly I'm not the only one living like that.
    • jhbadger 4y ago
      The problem is that your little local world is part of the bigger world and that world can affect you and your local world far more than you can affect it. Its like the hobbits in the Lord of the Rings. They'd like to stay in their cozy world of the Shire and ignore the rest of the world, but the rest of the world won't ignore the Shire.
• xyzzy123 4y ago
  I am absolutely on the COVID-19 lab leak train because it's plausibly true, no serious investigation has been done and a lot of contorted reasoning has been provided to the effect that no one should look. The other things I could care less about.
  • masswerk 4y ago
    However, there is only evidence to the contrary, the entire stretch from the Wuhan Institute of Virology to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market as the confirmed hotspot of the outbreak (samples from cages have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2) is entirely unaccounted for by this theory (this is about 20 minutes by car), the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 have been found in Laos and Vietnam (BANAL-236, BANAL-52) and not in China, and (according to US studies) there is genetic evidence for animal-human-animal-human transfer. As far as I am concerned, this is yet another attempt to make reality match preconceived politics. (Because reality is just another political game: who cares what may have actually happened, as long as we may own somebody?) Edit: To me, the real problem with this kind of games is that they tend to turn into an existential challenge or even threat. "If we can't own them, this will mean their victory, we may never allow this to happen! Otherwise, we're doomed."
    • 4bpp 4y ago
      But then I've heard assertions to the effect of a WIV research group performing sample collections at one of the caves in South East Asian countries where the closest wild relatives were found. (That they collected samples far afield is, as far as I know, uncontroversial; people are just arguing about whether they collected them at any of the specific closest-relative sites, which seems like a moot point if there is already more than one closest relative and so there could be more somewhere we didn't independently check) If anything, animal-human-animal-human transfer seems to serve to lessen the significance of the distance between the institute and the market and the samples from cages (since this makes a "researcher got infected in lab leak and then went to the market, infecting someone there, who passed it to the caged animals" sequence possible). Either way, I rarely see the same type of rigour or skepticism being applied to the natural-origin hypothesis (why is closest relatives being in a random cave in Laos a stronger argument against provenance through a far-away lab that does field work than against provenance through a wildlife market that is equally far away?), which is a hallmark of motivated reasoning. Motivation, here, is clearly plentiful, from researchers who could be personally scrutinised or have their scientific work encumbered by kneejerk procedural impositions to all the hundreds of millions of people for whom one or the other outcome would become a supreme cudgel to beat their outgroup with.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• swayvil 4y ago
  The modern popular epistemology is a flaming garbage trainwreck. We speak with certainty about things we never saw. We put our faith in the opinions of people we never met. Now get back to work.
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    It's kinda sad how the banner of skepticism has been co-opted and sort of turned into some sort of dogmatic scientism. We really need some pyrrho in our lives these times.
  • Dudeman112 4y ago
    While I agree that the epistemology is shite, there actually is a limit to how much you can do by your own self Not everybody has a large hadron collider on their garden
  • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    Yet the human lifespan is far too short to do your own verification for an appreciable number of important questions. At some point, practicality demands acquiescence to “someone smarter than me said so and hasn’t yet been proven blatantly incorrect” on at least some issues.
• seventytwo 4y ago
  Stop conflating “reality” with “perception”. Reality is the objective truth. Perception is out individual mental models of reality, built up by our own past experiences and our limited information set. Edit - I think this is actually a very important distinction to make. There IS an objective set of facts that can answer these questions definitively. And we need to remember that. By conflating terms like “reality” and “truth” with ideas of mental models and perception (or even using phrases like “my reality”), we’re already giving up before the game is even played. Reality and truth are must be defined as the objective, omniscient state, even if it is practically unknowable. They must be defined this way because we must acknowledge that those states exist at all so we can strive to get as close to them as possible. If we cease to acknowledge there is a real, objective truth, then everything is arbitrary and unmoored - we’re lost at sea with no bearing and no direction. I do agree with the general premise of the piece, however - that perceptions of reality in society have been weaponized and manipulated on an industrial scale. But it’s super super important not to lose the idea that “reality” exists.
  • Koshkin 4y ago
    But reality is not “the objective truth.” The notion of ‘truth’ belongs to the conceptual framework of knowledge (and the very complex process of its acquisition), and, unless you yourself conflate the mental image with reality, you realize that the objective, material world as such does not have to contain true or false statements about itself.
    • _gabe_ 4y ago
      > The notion of ‘truth’ belongs to the conceptual framework of knowledge Or, as I believe the OP is trying to point out, truth is what is. Just because people used to believe that maggots spontaneously generated doesn't mean it was true. The knowledge was false because the reality did not behave in accordance with the supposed knowledge. > you realize that the objective, material world as such does not have to contain true or false statements about itself. It does though. Gravity is stable on earth for the foreseeable future. Therefore, if I jump off a cliff, I will fall. This is true. It doesn't matter what flawed knowledge I gather that says otherwise, that would conflict with the reality. Reality is truth. The material world consists of truth simply by existing, and falsehoods arise when people try to conform reality to an idea that is wrong.
• yalogin 4y ago
  We as a society failed to see the bad thing about the internet and the services we are creating. May be it’s capitalism or may be it’s our naive trust that humans will figure it out, but the internet exaggerated our ability to lie and cover up that lie by lying again and again. People do that in real life too but the ease, quickness and scale at which one can lie and provide corroborative lies is something we completely missed. The 2016 election cycle made is when people fully realized this and q is the manifestation of this. Prior to the internet grifters would just operate in a geographically limited area but now it’s basically free to reach the whole world. They are taking advantage of every news event. Some worried that AI would the downfall of our civilization but the internet started it and AI with deepfake could just complete it. May be I am being too pessimistic ut I don’t think we can fix it at this point.
• meltyness 4y ago
  Thoughtful article, but not a new phenomenon. Consider the Hawking-Preskill wager regarding black hole information. The MIT Senior prank, Grievance-studies affair, or Sokal are another place where smart people do fun things. It would seem though that the endgame is wildly different though for this type of fun, where the incident social contract implies limited harm. This sort of bandwagoning which society has been pigeonholed into (betting is illegal, pranks are a cybersecurity risk) has wildly different material outcomes. Many places a proposition can be called into question, humans do so through whatever play they're allowed.
• whalesalad 4y ago
  always has been .jpg
• fallingfrog 4y ago
  My answers are a mix, I guess. 1) Possible but I don't know 2) Very likely 3) Very unlikely 4) Don't know what this means. What is the "American Project"? 5) Vague; is the assertion that the allegations were lies or the conclusions? 6) Very unlikely but I haven't looked at the data 7) His actions led to deaths, and none of the people that died deserved death for anything they did, so yes he did something wrong I feel like these are just kind of common sense opinions? None of my answers to these questions feel partisan, at least not to me. I definitely have different ways of determining truth than many other people, I suppose. I am absolutely certain, for example, that none of the creation myths or supernatural dieties that we have invented are real in any measurable way. I am pretty sure that most of the stories in, for example, the Bible were always meant to be read as metaphorical anyway. But the vast majority of the human race apparently disagrees with me on that, which blows my mind. How can they not see something so plainly obvious? It shouldn't even be a serious question. How do you deal with the fact that the majority of your fellow humans believe things that are obviously silly? I apparently just don't understand what normal people are doing when they say they are thinking. So the whole Qanon thing is on one level pretty much what you would expect from a species like us, and on another level it's still utterly baffling.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • aliqot 4y ago
    7. This is a unique take
    • fallingfrog 4y ago
      Well- it's a minimal statement that I thought most everyone would agree with. You may or may not think he acted in self defense, or you may or may not think what he did was illegal, but at the bare minimum you should be able to agree that 1) people died 2) those people didn't need to die and 3) Kyle Rittenhouse bears responsibility for those deaths. Those 3 facts are sufficient to establish that "Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong" is a false statement. It's an easy target though- the assertion is that he did nothing wrong, which is a very extreme statement and therefore easy to attack.
• breck 4y ago
  Dammit I hate articles like this. Really long but a skim reveals obviously very enlightening so now I need to budget time in the day to read.
• prionassembly 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
• nathanyz 4y ago
  Feels like peak capitalism where we have most needs met at the minimum required level and so we seek out more novelty and fun in our lives. Used to just be TV, but the amped up level of interest and adrenalin when it's happening in reality is too appealing.
• jollyllama 4y ago
  There's another way to look at this. My father, talking about growing up in the rust belt, told me how utterly bland and stifling he found the media environment in which he grew up. Paul McCartney and Skynyrd and mindlessly predictable TV plots and that was all there was. I'm almost certain he would have been an entirely different person if he grew up somewhere with more of a punk scene or proper folk tradition. The crushing conformity of the past, I think, is difficult to imagine. Sure, people can gravitate to 10 or so sites if they choose, but there is legitimately a whole world at your fingertips for you to explore.
  • germinalphrase 4y ago
    And yet, the past seemed to spring forth subcultures with distinct and durable lifestyles/aesthetics/belief systems. Now - it feels as if everything is contemporary and everything is transitory.
• kardianos 4y ago
  This series on reality is socially interesting but misses the fundamental question: Is it True? It muses on the social creation of why people think differently, but fails to ask: How can we know something to be True? I give an alternative: Seek Truth. Be humble.
  • tacitusarc 4y ago
    What level of certainty do you need to assert something is true?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • smallerfish 4y ago
      Robert Anton Wilson, renowned pot philosopher, proposed a revision to the english language: to remove the word "is". The problem with "is true" can be that you get affixed to the assertion, i.e. that it becomes something you're unwilling to question in future if new facts come to light. If you can think more in terms of "probably true", "plausible", etc then you can maintain more plasticity in your worldview.
      • kardianos 4y ago
        The problem isn't with language; that is how a Dialectic thinks.
        • CRConrad 4y ago
          So the problem isn't with languages, it's with dialects?
        • smallerfish 4y ago
          Sure, it's more a thought experiment than a serious proposal.
      • kragen 4y ago
• williamcotton 4y ago
  Silicon Valley gamifies social interactions resulting in social interactions behaving like people playing some strange game.
• helen___keller 4y ago
  A spooky future possibility: if we as a population are rupturing our shared perceptions of reality, will this affect our nations ability to perform on an international scale? If so, then over time power will shift to countries that heavily dictate allowable online discourse (China)
  • DoneWithAllThat 4y ago
    One of my greatest dreads is that at least for this era of humanity’s evolution the National censored/moderated strategy is the correct one. It may be that free speech for a nation was the winning play before the Information Age (and may be again in the future) but isn’t now. I don’t necessarily believe this, but it’s increasingly hard to build compelling arguments against it in the face of mounting evidence.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      I'm almost sure this is the case. Countries that don't lock things down are gonna get badly disrupted (not in the "good" tech-company sense) by other states that do, and take advantage of the others' openness. And not just states, but stronger-than-many-states corporations. I expect democracies to be particularly vulnerable. I think a wide-open global Internet in anything like its current form will turn out to be one of those things that seems amazing and mostly-great when you look at it from an individual perspective but has very bad consequences at a population scale, far outweighing any benefit. Again, especially for democracies—we thought it would liberalize oppressive states, but I think we got that tragically wrong, and it may in fact be the instrument that unleashes the "chaos" and painful disorder that critics of democracy and liberalism have always predicted.
    • JTbane 4y ago
      My greatest fear is the surveillance state, to be honest. The dragnet revelations mean that privacy really doesn't exist anymore, and police are always chomping at the bit to get more access to anything electronic.
  • ggpsv 4y ago
    A bit of a retorical question but isn't this a common source of contention between groups of people (across magnitudes of scale and means of information) throughout history?
• williamcotton 4y ago
  > Of course, QAnon followers think that their world is the real world, whereas ARG players know they are in a game. In an MMORPG, what kind of characters do not know they are in a game? Non-player characters?
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    One could imagine a clueless individual playing an ARG not realizing it's fictitious. Especially the less-interactive not-really-ARG ones where it's just a series of video uploads. Like, maybe, AlanTutorial.
    • williamcotton 4y ago
      I’d watch that movie!
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ttpphd 4y ago
  Characterizing the early 00s right after 9/11 as a time of unity is not right. It was also a time of massive hatred and bigotry against Muslims and liberals.
• Bouncingsoul1 4y ago
  "Those who have studied the past should not be surprised. The most contested subjects in human history have arguably not been land or fortunes, but symbols, ideas, beliefs, and possibilities" I read a lot of history and I'm quite sure it was mostly about land
  • pyinstallwoes 4y ago
    Yeah but how were the actions motivated? One must use symbols to coordinate. E.g religion, mesiahs, leaders, ideas, democracy, etc.
  • spywaregorilla 4y ago
    Don't forget food, water, and the sweet ass gold
    • photochemsyn 4y ago
      And, from about 1905 onwards, that dirty, dirty crude oil has been fought over relentlessly.
    • Bouncingsoul1 4y ago
      land is basically access to food and water. Remember for most part until 1800 or so taxes were paid in food
  • dalbasal 4y ago
    Different sides of a polyface coin. For example, I'm from Israel. Two hundred hundred moons ago, I was involved in a civil peace initiative. The point was for citizens to discuss this unofficial peace document so that it could form the basis of an official one at some point... Peace agreements are "war by other means" par excellence. Anyway... this conflict is most definitely about land. What made this specific initiative ballsy was the fact that it included maps and took on land issues directly. This also meant that only extreme peaceniks from either side would go anywhere near the project. What where our discussions about? Narratives. What were our disagreements about? Narratives. What compromises did we fail to make? Narratives. What happened. What it means. What proverbial schoolchildren should be taught. What symbolic steps must be taken to in recognition of the correct narrative. BTW... active fighters were involved in this initiative. Israeli soldiers and palestinian militants. A lot of them. They even had their own groups. Disavowing violence was not a precondition to participating. Disavowing violence rarely came up as a demand or request by participants. People could, often, understand and live with past and future violence. Disavowing narratives and symbolism was constantly demanded as a precondition to everything. Hostile, competing narratives and symbols are a deep essense of conflict. They aren't just caused by conflict. They don't just cause conflict. They are conflict. I'm also irish, and the story of northern ireland is also proof of this idea.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  The questions that are broadly acceptable to the corporate media - i.e. that are the subjects of written or spoken debate - are generally not the important or interesting questions. They're mostly click-bait fluff intended to up the 'engagement' factor. The only one in that list that's of much interest is about the origins of the Covid pandemic, and even there the real question is whether or not to implement a global ban on gain-of-function research with infectious viruses and microbes. As far as the details on the origins of Covid and links to the Ecohealth-Alliance-funded Wuhan Institute of Virology, well, read a book (Viral by Chan & Ridley, 2021). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58647975-viral https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58647975-viral Here's an alternative list of questions that I'd argue really matter, but which are typically avoided by corporate media: 1. Is the US economy overly controlled by finance, and does this have serious negative repercussions for the long-term health of the economy? Is finance really capable of long-term planning and basic infrastructure development? 2. Is the US military budget out of control? The (inflation-adjusted) size of that budget over the past few decades has certainly increased. Are those wasted resources? (A related question has to do with our military entanglements around the planet, such as with Saudi Arabia, Israel, NATO, etc.) 3. Do all of the free trade deals that the USA has pushed for over the past 40 years really help the US economy prosper, or are they the main reason for the huge wealth gap across American society and the destruction of the American manufacturing sector (and the rise of angry populist politics) ? Now, those are interesting questions and I imagine views vary widely on those issues - but you won't see them addressed in our pathetic media system.
  • mberning 4y ago
    #3 was warned about long ago. Look at the debates with Ross Perot in them. He predicted precisely what has happened. He essentially said if we have free trade with the rest of the world and they make $2 an hour and we make $10 an hour then jobs will not stop leaving until everybody makes $6 an hour. And that is precisely what is and has happened. The question to me is how the political class in the US has become completely captured by globalist robber barons for decades.
• kelseyfrog 4y ago
  Reality has always been a game, it's just that we've gone from a few players to a multitude of players. The few players version has been a meta-stable state since the development of orthodoxy.
• masswerk 4y ago
  > What I realized I had no idea how to convey was how important television was to the whole experience (9/11). What really struck me was the kind of reporting. Where I live (or, in Europe in general) – and I'm not under the impression that it had been that different in the US – there was some kind of agreement of handling severe incidents respectfully. You would show any footage a couple of times, but then everybody would know and further repetitions were rather considered as some kind of cruel pornography. But here, watching CNN and similar outlets, the planes kept crashing and crashing, and the buildings kept collapsing and collapsing, over and over, exposing the moments that meant death for thousands mercilessly on the screens. It was the beginning of a new era in mass media. And I guess, this may be hard to convey to anyone who wasn't there to experience this.
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    I was in High School when it happened, and yes I remember looping footage of the buildings coming down. I think it was a shock response more than a crafted plan to get views, but it did show them how to hold your attention. One detail I remember about being in school is that we were all old enough to understand, but I was told that younger students did not understand that they were watching replays of the same incident and thought multiple buildings were collapsing every time.
• theonemind 4y ago
  Large topic that I can't do much justice to in an HN comment, but the prophet/town-crier on this one seems like Ian McGilchrist: https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western-ebook/dp/B07NS35S76 https://www.amazon.com/Master-His-Emissary-Divided-Western-e... I think modern society is in the bad attractor field of the left-hemisphere mode of thought (as opposed to the right-hemisphere attractor field.) You see a fragmented reality unaffected by evidence, fragments out of context becoming menacing and leading to paranoia, people operating in self-contained virtual worlds based on axioms simplified to the point of falsity, positive feedback loops where exposure makes you want more, rather than negative feedback loops where you get satiated.
• nailer 4y ago
  I think it comes down to identity. There’s no conflict to believe Russiagate was fake and that Trump lost the election. But people treat politics like team sports and chose their “teams” position on matters.
• tristor 4y ago
  1. Probably, but not provably. 2. Almost certainly, but perhaps not necessarily. 3. Most likely false 4. IDK/C 5. It originated from lies, but found truths in the process. 6. Probably not, causal links are hard to establish 7. True The "problem" with the questions they asked, is that short pithy statements like these lack all form of nuance and so cannot fully encapsulate what is actually reality. They only contain a distilled perception of that reality through a particular set of biases. For the most part, nothing in life is that simple, and therefore simple statements are often not actually factual, because they miss critical nuance and detail to make them so. Ironically, if you read my answers above, you likely think I'm right-wing adjacent based on them, but in fact I am politically left-of-center, I either didn't have enough information to answer conclusively, or I have investigated these topics so thoroughly that I am aware that it's not very clear cut. For instance, several of these relate to recent issues from the former administration in the US... I've read the Mueller Report, somehow despite being rather thorough, very different pithy perspectives are arrived at from the contents by various partisans. I think the article has a point, but I think the bigger issue is that most people only have the attention span and mental acuity necessary to deal in soundbites, whether that's from the Internet, cable news, or newspaper headlines doesn't really matter. It's not the medium that's the issue, it's that the average person expends no mental energy whatsoever on actually understanding the topics they hold forth opinions on. I've always tried to be someone with strong opinions, loosely held, and open to evidence and reason. Unfortunately the average person is somebody with weak opinions, strongly held, and closed to evidence and reason. The Internet didn't cause this, this is just how human beings generally are, the world over, and throughout history.
  • williamcotton 4y ago
    “It’s not for the lack of traffic signs and signals that people keep crashing into each other at intersections rather that the average person does not take it upon themselves to slow down.”
• Roark66 4y ago
  The problem is not that to some "reality is a game", but there are a lot of people that have given up on independently verifying information they get. There always were people like that. People that feel happy offloading their thinking process to others. Whatever others think is truth to them. I suspect in the old times those "others" were primarily friends and family, perhaps "talking heads" on TV. That was not great, but not hugely problematic. Today, for many people, their opinions are shaped by various selection of: media that always wants to drive engagement up(every story is an outrage), various commercial interest groups, foreign hostile psy-ops, domestic trolls, various genuinely troubled people. All those things masquerade as "friends" in our "customised" feed being very effective in convincing large groups of people of their bull**. Unfortunately, this may be a genuine barrier to further technological advancement of human race. If the majority of us can't tell what's real (often not because of inability, but because of mental laziness) how can we increase our connectedness even more? (with neural implants or other future gadgets).
  • imiric 4y ago
    Correct. This fact is well known and exploited by those with the means and interest to reach a political goal, accrue wealth, and gain or stay in power, i.e. corporations, governments and advertisers. The internet is a playground for this crowd, and they couldn't have asked for a better tool. It's incredibly ironic that the same adtech and social media built by western societies, sources of so much pride and prosperity, is legally and knowingly used by both internal and external enemies to influence their governments in any way they please, without leaving any trace of who did it, or what they exactly did to begin with, since it happens on long timescales with millions of small "attacks". It's the ultimate weapon. As to how we get out of it? It's difficult putting the genie back in the bottle now. We can educate people about critical thinking and disinformation, but that will only reach those who are open to hear it. We can regulate social media platforms, but we run into a few problems: a) governments have no idea how they work or how to even begin enforcing regulation, b) corporations will never agree to self-regulate since it directly impacts their growth interests, and c) even if they do agree, it's an incredibly difficult technical challenge. I think the solution lies somewhere involving all of the above. I think we all have to live with this now, as it's only going to get worse before, and if, it gets better. Also, this is a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
• imiric 4y ago
  I think the article underestimates the role of social media in all of this. Let's state some known _facts_: - Troll farms are operated on a massive scale in Russia, China and most G20 nations, operated by their respective governments. Their direct goal is to spread disinformation and propaganda on social media. - Advertising that powers most social media to brainwash masses into buying products, has been weaponized to also spread disinformation and propaganda, brainwashing masses into believing conspiracy theories and being an active participant in rage culture. Just these two facts alone are enough to destabilize communities, polarize political discourse and corrupt democratic processes. The current sociopolitical climate in most countries with access to social media is a product of information warfare. It's the cheapest and most hands-off alternative to traditional and even cyber warfare. It's played over long timescales and doesn't produce immediate results, but it's extremely effective, and confuses the enemy into not understanding the state they're in, or how they got there. Precisely what this article is trying to determine.
  • mistermann 4y ago
    Notice how your facts are not accompanied by an open source categorization algorithm (which would reveal how easy it is for them to be true, as stated/framed). Also notice that this level of epistemic transparency is not only not needed for people to believe that what you say is true (and the beliefs that subsequently emerge from that), but will typically be actively opposed by both unintelligent and genuinely intelligent people.
    • imiric 4y ago
      I don't understand what you're asking for. What I stated as facts can be independently verified by anyone with minor research. Troll farms are a reality. Cambridge Analytica and similar companies are a reality. QAnon started on an online forum, where most conspiracy theories live and grow. Information warfare exists on an unprecedented scale thanks to the internet, whether you're aware of it or not.
      • mistermann 4y ago
• dalbasal 4y ago
  This is pretty meandering, and some parts are quite good. However... I feel like this relies on a narrow perspective of the past. Did people's belief systems not work this way in the past? I mean, the social internet is new, and that changes things, but what's our baseline? Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs. A lot of the emotion, tension and conflict that results from a church schism is similar to the political schisms cited here. Religion also sometimes encourages "alternate reality games" as described here. Find clues in scripture, the flight of birds or whatnot. See a deeper reality than all those fools. Religious devotees alway "produce and consume game materiel" in much the same way. Your chances of convincing a MAGA, BLM or any other modern political devotee to reform might seem slim... but they're much better than with religion. In fact, they usually fizzle out naturally while religious beliefs are very resilient. Anyway, my point isn't to bash religion, it's to say that maybe this is all just normal human behavior. Maybe the TV era was the unusual phenomenon. Maybe we're not all supposed to believe the same things.
  • SkipperCat 4y ago
    I remember pre-internet, and it was hard to find communities of people who deviated from societal norms. If you strongly believed in something that was way off from what society beloved or accepted, you were alone and your drive for that topic probably fizzled out after a while. It was also hard to reinforce your belief system if CBS, ABC and NBC didn't share your views. Now, in Internet-world, you can instantly get connected with like minded folks and have your beliefs accepted, which probably reinforces your stance even more. So I guess the baseline is, back in the pre-Facebook days, there were just less people on the fringe.
  • coldtea 4y ago
    >Religion, for example, has always been good at dividing us into sects with competing narrative beliefs. A lot of the emotion, tension and conflict that results from a church schism Usually it was the opposite: emotion, tension and conflict for political and national/group interest reasons, were translated into church language. That's why the religion divisions were seldom, if ever, within the same demographic, but between groups that already had historical grievances or were beginning to have something to divide (as nations, classes, cultural groups, private interests, and so on). Of course it's never 100% clean, as there would also be a feedback loop - but the underlying cause were almost always some interest, not theological.
• greenhearth 4y ago
  What a great article. Perfectly walks through the current social crisis of ennui and stupidity. The one thing that it didn't seem to mention is a physiological-chemical basis for all the enjoyment. Ever wonder why every video of some guy cooking an egg or screwing in a light bulb screams at you about how "satisfying" it is? This lack of some satisfaction, no doubt caused by some mechanisms of addiction, is clearly at play in this video game reality show.
• kragen 4y ago
  This is a really good article. I think a significant insight missing from it is that corporations, states, wars, and the like are also alternate reality games — as was the cultural wasteland of mass-media-manufactured consent whose loss it mourns. Not just the genesis of revolutions, but also their aftermath. It does glance at this idea but doesn't seriously engage with it: > the bygone era of mass media was not a golden age of truth, … But what matters here is that… [i]n an age of alternate realities, narratives do not converge. Is that really what matters? Is it even a new phenomenon, or a process that was ever interrupted? I don't think that, in the bygone era of mass media, the narrative peddled on NBC converged with that of Iran's Guardian Council or Pravda; nor did Joe McCarthy's narrative ever converge with that of the Port Huron Statement. And there are times, like the murder of Kitty Genovese, where the narrative did converge, but it converged on utter falsehood. If this doesn't convince you, reread the article carefully, thinking about how well or poorly each thing it says about modern alternate reality games applies to the historical persecution of Communists in the US, anti-Communists in the USSR and PRC, or heretics in the Spanish Inquisition. You will find it an uncomfortably tight fit. To me it seems more important to be able to coexist with people with different beliefs, people who aren't playing the same alternate reality game you are. Lacking that ability, dissent yields mass bloodshed, so polities ruthlessly suppress dissent in order to survive, condemning themselves to self-defeating delusion. We have centuries of practice developing institutions (that is to say, alternate reality games) that can survive dissent: liberalism, capitalism, academia, pacifism, Gandhian nonviolent resistance, parliamentary procedure, and now free software and Wikipedia. Other cultures have other institutions I'm unfamiliar with. All of them are under immense stress from the internet revolution, and it's anybody's guess how that will shake out.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  People enjoy joining conspiracy communities because it makes life feel meaningful. I watched one of my neighbors warp into a 9/11 truther and in the last few years I run into a lot of people online who wake up in the morning and have to inform everybody about the latest discoveries they've made about how everything the government has done about COVID-19 is wrong, not just because people were having to make decisions in a hurry with limited information, but because the people involved are evil. My first take on that article was that my answer to 5 of the 7 of the questions at the top are ambigious. For #1 for instance I think there is no real proof of the lab leak hypothesis but that it is also not implausible.
• seydor 4y ago
  Maybe because people are increasingly feeling as if they are spectators to their life going by. Our lives are increasingly feeling like they are run by media bosses and central bankers.
• aihkas 4y ago
  Really weak article. Your typical bothsidesism and unity nonsense. He's talking about how the country was united to face the enemy after 9/11. Talk about fish memory. What enemy is he talking about? Did he forget about the disastrous Iraq war and the division it made? The patriot act!? NSA surveillance, the 2008 economic crisis, etc. Most of the problems today can be traced to the Bush administration, and the aftermath of 9/11.
  • pyinstallwoes 4y ago
    That's like... 1/8th of the article and misses the point entirely. But it is also too long for it's conclusion.
  • djitz 4y ago
    The author is clearly referring to the time immediately following 9/11, which is by far the most united these states have been since WW2.
  • onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    > Most of the problems today can be traced to the Bush administration, and the aftermath of 9/11. I'd argue many larger problems trace back to Nixon than Bush.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• zackmorris 4y ago
  2. Climate change demands a radical transformation of modern lifestyles. A bit off-topic, but I'm sad that this was politicized, as that's exactly what's required to stop global climate change. There are too many geopolitical forces standing in the way of concerted efforts to stop it. And even if we could summon a multilateral front, the process is probably too far along to be stopped via centralized brute force anyway. As we've passed the inflection point, the next 20 years may bring 1.5 to 2 times the warming we've already had since 2000, tipping into a runaway positive feedback loop. Somehow everyone's got to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and go solar, drive electric cars, buy local, etc. We're probably conservatively talking $10,000-100,000 USD per household, or about $40,000 if we use the logarithmic mean. Times 2 billion households, perhaps $80 trillion USD to a first-order approximation to go sustainable tomorrow. But that financial burden alone would disrupt lifestyles in the short term.. Now that's what's needed, but of course we probably won't do that. We'll just double down on our current lifestyles as developing nations join the industrialized world and fire up a bunch of nuclear plants and start scrubbing CO2, then add fusion sometime in the 2030s. Maybe put sunshades in orbit at L1, pollute the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight, seed algae blooms with iron to suck CO2, do all of the other things as we continue to deforest and desertify the planet as we finish out the 6th mass extinction of the holocene. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction But hey, that's just an externality, who cares. IMHO a distributed approach at the individual level is the only one that has a hope of succeeding. We could all choose to conserve and grow victory gardens as our patriotic duty like in WWI. But no matter how much proof is presented, people believe what they want to believe, for no other reason than to disagree with the environmentalists and academic community. Even here on this very site with some of the smartest people in the world, I suspect the opinion on this is split 50/50. For all of those reasons, I think it's irresponsible for the article to call something like climate change a game. A nuisance we'll simply ignore to our detriment sure. But not a game.
  • CobrastanJorji 4y ago
    I agree with your reasoning, but I don't see how individual level effort can solve the problem. Ignoring the fact that it's impossible (the average household simply can't spend $40,000 on anything, let alone the environment), individuals are only involved in maybe a quarter of emissions. Unless the giant corporations also change, every single human going carbon neutral wouldn't be nearly enough. It'd certainly be a big help, but it wouldn't solve the problem.
• tjnaylor 4y ago
  "The point here is not to draw a moral equivalence, or to say that all these actors have lost their grip to the same degree, but rather to suggest a troubling family resemblance. The underlying structure of the reality-gamesmanship we find in, say, Infowars has its counterpart in, say, Trump-era CNN: incentives and rewards, heroes and villains, plotlines, reveals, satisfying narrative arcs." Structurally CNN could never claim to have video of "literal vampire pot-belly goblins" coming to steal their children like Jones has. When it comes to this topic, the two just are not counterparts in any sense worth considering morally or otherwise. The underlying stucture the author describes simply notes that both CNN and Infowars use narrative. True, but this observation could be applied to virtually any public facing commercial enterprise (not just news) both present and past. In the context of this piece (even after the author's self-aware qualification) its a glaring mistake to describe Infowars and CNN as each others "counterpart" regarding making Reality into a game. Infowars does so with far greater intensity and impact to the point where comparison much less equivalence feels like a disengenous attempt to "both sides" their way out of coming across as partisan. Up to now, a left-wing counterpart with remotely the reach and intensity of things like Infowars, OAN, or even Fox news has simply not immerged. To treat this topic seriously acknowledgement of the partisan imbalance is necesary and shouldn't be ignored/side-stepped. There does not exist left-wing counterpart to Jan 6 and the subsequent acceptance of it on the right. There does not exist a left-wing counterpart to the belief that Obama was a succesfully installed manchurian candidate from Kenya (of all countries). There does not exist a left wing counterpart to Fox News' political comic section on a daily basis promoting for over a year (still ongoing) a conspiracy that Joe Biden finds nourishment drinking literal children's blood from a sippy cup. There does not exist a left-wing counterpart to contesting deeply understood physical phenomena like climate change fueled by human produced CO2. But we don't blink at these things, because it's "normal" for rightwing outlets to do this in a way it simply is not for left wing outlets. The steele dossier finds its counterpart not in Jan 6 as the piece seems to suggest with it's a or b "pick one" offering, but the far lesser scandal of Hunter Biden's laptop. Both are tainted wells of genuine and partisan injected scandal. And its worth acknowledging, the left abuses objectivity occasionally like with their floating of the Steele Dossier. Still, the left has never so much whispered something so politcally scandolous as abandonment of parliamentary democracy. The Republican party, after failing to do so on Jan 6, continues pursuing just that within state legislatures as its main political project at the moment. Chalking up Jan 6 and Steele Dossier as essentially the same thing at heart just dialed to different degrees really misunderstands the techniques, technologies, and structures at play. This imbalance has to be reckoned with for a serious attempt to better understand the "gamefication of reality" occuring foremost within both mainstream and fringe Republican realms and to an almost incomprably diminished degree on the left.
• avgcorrection 4y ago
  Oh my god, the endless lamentation about the fracturing into infinitesmall “filter bubbles” (pukes) while in reality there is mainly the binary “red vs. blue team”, “Reps and Dems used to be able to attend family dinners but now they cannot”. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Do you like cats or dogs? Pepsi? Or Coke? So thirty years ago you were apolitical, sat in front of the TV, and didn’t take things so personally. Now you are pseudo-political (Culture Wars), sat in front of YouTube, and identify with nonsense. No change of major consequence has happened. The TV was already The Matrix, you fool. Now you complain that at least you used to share one common Matrix instead of Red Matrix and Blue Matrix—at least we could all agree on what veal tasted like (which didn’t really exist) sighs
  • raydiatian 4y ago
    Yeah I got about four paragraphs in. I asked to read an article, not a novel
    • marzell 4y ago
      Were you mislead somehow?
• wheelerof4te 4y ago
  Whenever I read an article that treats 9/11 as anything other than inside job meant to goad the public into accepting an insane "War on Terror", I question the credibility of it's author. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that removed obstacles to global domination of petro-dolllar are a direct consequence of this event.
• ilaksh 4y ago
  Check out "The Righteous Mind" by Haidt.
• anigbrowl 4y ago
  What we haven’t figured out how to make sense of yet is the fun that many Americans act like they’re having with the national fracture. Why is the author confused about this? The people who are having fun are doing so because they see a correlation between the degree of fracture and their own wellbeing (political, economic, strategic). They don't feel invested in the status quo (perhaps quite legitimately) and see more opportunity in either a fragmented and chaotic polity or a new status quo in which they occupy a higher position. Sure, you could say 'but this makes no sense, everyone will be worse off', but this is self-evidently not the case. Revolutions, civil wars, etc. have winners and losers. Most end up as losers, but some people make out like bandits. And people who are losing (or who just feel like they're not winning enough) under the current or foreseeable future systems feel incentivized to bet on something different. The point of [role playing games] was not to beat your opponent but to share in the thrill of making up worlds and pretending to act in them. No. The point of role-playing games is to experience freedom of action by making up worlds with fewer constraints - but with the validation that comes from sharing the process as opposed to daydreaming. For kids and teenagers the constraints might be structural ones like having to go to school and follow arbitrary-seeming conventions. For adult enthusiasts the constraints might be economic reality - without access to unusual resources or talent, the options and payoff horizons of everyday life may seem very unsatisfying. You can see a sort of meta-argument about this in the rise of boring simulation videogames, which let you experience a dull job or social obligation in all its futility and tedium, with the payoff for the player being that when you get sufficiently bored, you are allowed to stop playing and nothing bad will happen - whereas rejecting things that seem dysfunctional or futile in normal life might be economically disastrous. The main change wrought by the internet has been the widespread realization that political representatives and social elites are not the highly refined output of a meritocratic selection process, but often mediocrities that lucked into assortativity and network effects. Those who perceive social and economic institutions to be gamed in various ways are incentivized to rewrite the rules of the game in their favor, and are enthusiastic in proportion to their skill and expectations of success. Think of the old not-really-a-joke about the two campers whose sleep is disturbed by a bear. One stirs up the fire with the plan of scaring the bear away, the other starts putting on shoes. 'Why are you putting on shoes? you can't outrun a bear' says the first camper, to which the second replies 'I don't have to - I only need to outrun you.' I describe it as not-really-a-joke because this sort of story can be a subtextual way of communicating that the teller prefers to minimize their own risk rather than pool it with someone else, and disavows any prior assumptions about teamwork or loyalty. Similar examples include the frog and scorpion (frog gives scorpion a lift across a river; scorpion stings him because 'it's in my nature' although this makes them bother worse off) and the woman who picked up the snake (which then bites her and says 'what did you expect, I'm a snake' and slithers off in search of another victim). Often, people are communicating their preferred or idealized outcomes quite clearly, but their audience are confused or unhappy about it and respond with appeals to decency, reality, science, orthodoxy and so on. Such appeals are often a coping mechanism to avoid the unpleasant implication that the communicator is going to bail on, sabotage, or attack them. Appeals to moral or existential authority are only forceful to the degree of mutual connectivity, and miss the fact that in these story examples the parties are isolated and there's nobody around to intervene. To sum up, when people set out to reshape reality it's often because they see advantage in doing so, and disagreements about rationality often mask a conflict of values.
• jackcosgrove 4y ago
  Sensory pathways in the brain must reinforce engrams more effectively than thought patterns. In other words, if you read or hear a message through your senses, that fixes the neural pathways triggered by this stimulus more firmly than had you just been ruminating on the topic. At least, that's my theory as to why the internet has increased polarization. People have always been able to think in odd ways, but the negative reinforcement from a conforming outside culture suppressed these thought patterns. The internet gives your brain external stimuli that validate your thoughts, and this causes your brain structure to change moreso than had your thoughts not been reinforced. The inability to communicate between those on opposite sides of society's divisions is not just a failure of imagination. In some cases the brain circuitry of the interlocutors is so different that being subjected to the same stimulus leads to wildly different responses and consensus is impossible without one or both parties altering their brain structure through sensory counter programming.
• DubiousPusher 4y ago
  > Perhaps even revolution was the result. Russian revolutionary activity, in particular, was inextricably tied up with novels. Lenin wrote about Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? that “before I came to know the works of Marx … only Chernyshevsky wielded a dominating influence over me, and it all began with What Is to Be Done?,” and that “under its influence hundreds of people became revolutionaries.” He later borrowed the novel’s title for his own 1902 revolutionary tract. In our day, the departure from consensus reality began in innocent fashion, and with a different genre of entertainment: with wizards and dice rolls in 1970s basements. As cultlike and dogmatic as the Communist party became, I don't think this is a very apt comparison. Pleasant revolutionaries we're starving and demanded land reform. Worker revolutionaries we're being burnt up like fuel and demanded relief. Whatever crank beliefs they had were not their primary motivator the way cultural political derangement seems to be the primary motivator of QAnon and hardcore MAGA.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• lawrenceyan 4y ago
  This article spends its entire content deriding the notion of narratives, but it takes advantage of that very same mechanism in order to try and entice readers into following it. I think rather than trying to find the “one true source of information”, which can be incredibly dangerous, the real “redpill” is learning to develop the meta skills of critical reading and research. Who is the author of your piece? What are their motivations and biases? Can you find sources and citations for the research posted? At the same time, also recognize that it’s unlikely you’ll have the time/resources to fully deep dive into every piece of news or commentary that you read. That should come with it a certain level of humbleness and willingness to consider the alternative if (and when) you’re wrong.
• cf141q5325 4y ago
  Relevant on the topic https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analysis-of-qanon-580972548be5 https://medium.com/curiouserinstitute/a-game-designers-analy... >It’s not that strange actually. In fact, the difference between apophenia and science is just the scientific process and the reliance on proof. People make the connection before they know for a fact if it’s real or not. Maybe it is apophenia, maybe not. It’s a hypothesis. THEN YOU TEST IT. The facts determine the outcome and then, whether it feels good or not, you accept them. Even scientists may not want to let go of a good theory that just isn’t panning out. The feeling of correctness is over-powering. This is why people need to have peer-reviews. Colleagues need to be able to replicate results. Solutions need to be tested and the facts harnessed. >In Q, the proof is more apophenia! Another arrow in the dirt in an endless cycle back to the central propaganda. It has to because there is no truth. The answer is whatever feels the best, makes the most sense, and helps the story. Any truth is just fuel for the propaganda and reinforces the conclusions of the apophenia and central narrative. >It feels like it’s really happening. It especially seems so when cheered on by a curated fake “community” clapping you on the back and telling you you are a hero for every radical leap into the void you make. Once you start to parse reality according to what feels right, embracing cognitive biases in the process, people will of course exploit that. Because its very profitable. There is a reason the advertisement industry is as big as it is
• kukkeliskuu 4y ago
  If you take the old wisdom of the East and scientific knowledge from the West and go deep enough, you may conclude that this is related to human features that are not new. We start believing things, and then make up stories around these beliefs. Facts do not usually make us re-evaluate the beliefs, but to just refine our stories. The meta-narrative of the article is just a story. You cannot get around the human feature by reading or inventing new beliefs or stories. If you want to free yourself from this conundrum, you need to learn to hack the beliefs and stop believing the stories you tell yourself.