5 ms·

Eyes That Bite

42 points by samclemens 4y ago

wpietri 4y ago
"... I am sure Wolf is accurate to the MRIs when she says that the shift to digital has made skimming the new norm. Scrolling and swiping have increased our ability to survey large amounts of information, but they do not engage those areas of the reading brain where we imagine and are moved by the lives of others. We have, in neurological terms, an app for that and it is no longer being switched on." Ouch. Right between the eyes. Lately I've been mournfully surveying my bookshelves and realizing how much my reading has shifted away from whole books. In trying to get back to it, I feel like in some ways I'm learning to read all over again.
- spockz 4y ago
  This resonates. It seems like on digital I have become very adapt at skimming and filtering text to see whether it is relevant but once I found something it is that much harder to let it really sink in.
- alar44 4y ago
  Who cares? A couple hundred years ago the avg person couldn't read at all. I find it annoying that people equate long form writing with "the default way humans are supposed to be". The default normal way of a human is being a shit chucking ape in the woods. Give yourself some fucking credit.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    I obviously care. And I didn't equate the two things. The average state of the universe is hard vacuum with a sprinkling of hydrogen, but I'm still going to aim a bit higher myself. You do you, though.
- williamsmj 4y ago
  You might enjoy Wolf's appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maryanne-wolf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas....
- yummypaint 4y ago
  The article brings to mind the cognitive changes associated with literacy. As socrates put it at the time: You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so. These days when people hear about someone reciting an hour long story from memory after hearing it once, the assumption is they must be some kind of savant, but it used to be much more commonplace. I worry particular about broad systematic losses in empathy relative to the previous baseline. Maybe this is a side-effect of changes to our attention, but it sounds like a much bigger problem. Writing made us more forgetful, but it also had tremendous upsides. I struggle to see comparable benefits from the skim/filter mindset. It seems like it's more of a defensive reaction to the amount of garbage online than something that can elevate human thought as a transformative mental tool.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    For me at least, social media has been a big boon to empathy. It has brought me in contact with so many viewpoints and experiences that are not part of my day-to-day life. Indeed, because of mutual distance, people get to be frank about their worlds in ways that can't be with a neighbor. People can of course use it to construct echo chambers, which don't help empathy. And the rise of "the cruelty is the point" politics surely owes something to the changes in media, but that's harder to untangle.
    - _siis 4y ago
      I think that is a very naive opinion and you are very mistaken but mostly only because you lack an understanding of how diabolical these systems actually are, how they work and are designed. Its not that people could construct echo chambers (as some far off thought), its that they have, and they lied about it to you and everyone else (through omission and redirection), and they continue to do so regularly. If you are on any kind of social media, you are always in an echo chamber. I'm not going to go into all the arguments, you can do your own research, but the two that deserve the most attention are the optimization for engagement which optimizes for both positive and negative content and subversion aspect. Have you ever heard of the Alt-right pipeline? Its becoming fairly well documented, its basically a series of content that after watching, you are shown other content, and that content becomes gradually more and more extreme. Most of the time its very subtle (10 or more steps), and those algorithms and software are designed so you only see content that is optimized in this way, and they intentionally make visible objective video and history limited. You may notice previous watched videos disappear unless you know a direct keyword to locate them again, it was engineered as intended. The way it goes, you might watch a video that pops to the Joel Rogan podcast for a guest speaker you are interested in, that then shows some interesting intellectual things with Jordan Peterson, and after a series of next content, maybe eventually you arrive at David Iccke and his talks about the greys and the reptilians (conspiracy of the Lizard Illimunati), QAnon, Neo nazis, or something else that are extreme or radical (and many steps removed). It sounds crazy, but its been documented. Social media is the perfect propaganda machine, because its a 1 to many platform because there are methods in place to allow someone to dictate what you see, and limit what people see you say (amplification and de-amplification). Policies are geared to allow this weakness by design. You might notice the mass media does the same thing, and you'd be right, but they were less effective for this purpose. As American's we aren't taught a lot about propaganda, which in my opinion does everyone a huge disservice because you can't recognize misinformation and propaganda without knowing what its goals are. Other countries unfortunately have also followed our lead in this regard. Its also difficult to punish entities that push it because its largely considered protected by free speech since Corporations are people. Most people I've met domestically and abroad only have a very naive understanding of what propaganda actually is, and I haven't met a person who could tell me what its goals were when asked. In other more restrictive countries its illegal, and the methods are taught (depending on the country) for their benefit, and it often goes by another name called subversion or more fully ideological subversion. This has been used by all governments, historically, ever since WW2 as the nuclear age became too risky for outright conflict in a MAD world. So non-alerting methods were developed to overthrow foreign governments without war, aimed primarily at manipulating the targeted countries citizens into unrest allowing a small minority to overthrowing the repressive regimes at little loss of life to the country performing these machinations. It is sophisticated and subtle, its strength is it flies in under the radar, and it often employs many well-known psychological blindspots to do this which everyone has. One of the primary targets is often the next generation's children because they lack the critical thinking faculties to discern the threat before age 12 due to developmental biology. Cialdini wrote a book detailing many of those blindspots and examples where they've been used in his book called Influence. The overall goal is, putting you into a psychological state where you can't react, or you react so irrationally that you jump at shadows with little provocation. The intended effect is discord and disunity, so no organized response occurs, and to corrupt aspects that make up a citizens national, religious, or moral identity since this leads to further discord and disunity and these people are unable to recognize truth from fiction in this irrational state. In that kind of diabolical coup, those irrational people are almost always killed later, after a change has been instrumented to solidify the new normal (power structure). If you were taught proper modern history (WW2+), you'd already know a lot of this, but I didn't get that sense from your response (hence my response). This is also why this topic and related references have largely been removed from public education, the same has also occurred regarding socialism's negative aspects in that sphere, and we are seeing a lot of conflict spawned from various movement sponsored ideals that lack true understanding of the underlying philosophy they subscribe to lately which is very worrisome.
neonate 4y ago
http://web.archive.org/web/20221224173133/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n01/anne-enright/eyes-that-bite http://web.archive.org/web/20221224173133/https://www.lrb.co... https://archive.ph/UWZlY https://archive.ph/UWZlY

42 points by samclemens 4y ago

"... I am sure Wolf is accurate to the MRIs when she says that the shift to digital has made skimming the new norm. Scrolling and swiping have increased our ability to survey large amounts of information, but they do not engage those areas of the reading brain where we imagine and are moved by the lives of others. We have, in neurological terms, an app for that and it is no longer being switched on." Ouch. Right between the eyes. Lately I've been mournfully surveying my bookshelves and realizing how much my reading has shifted away from whole books. In trying to get back to it, I feel like in some ways I'm learning to read all over again.

spockz 4y ago
This resonates. It seems like on digital I have become very adapt at skimming and filtering text to see whether it is relevant but once I found something it is that much harder to let it really sink in.
alar44 4y ago
Who cares? A couple hundred years ago the avg person couldn't read at all. I find it annoying that people equate long form writing with "the default way humans are supposed to be". The default normal way of a human is being a shit chucking ape in the woods. Give yourself some fucking credit.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I obviously care. And I didn't equate the two things. The average state of the universe is hard vacuum with a sprinkling of hydrogen, but I'm still going to aim a bit higher myself. You do you, though.
williamsmj 4y ago
You might enjoy Wolf's appearance on Ezra Klein's podcast https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maryanne-wolf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas....
yummypaint 4y ago
The article brings to mind the cognitive changes associated with literacy. As socrates put it at the time: You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so. These days when people hear about someone reciting an hour long story from memory after hearing it once, the assumption is they must be some kind of savant, but it used to be much more commonplace. I worry particular about broad systematic losses in empathy relative to the previous baseline. Maybe this is a side-effect of changes to our attention, but it sounds like a much bigger problem. Writing made us more forgetful, but it also had tremendous upsides. I struggle to see comparable benefits from the skim/filter mindset. It seems like it's more of a defensive reaction to the amount of garbage online than something that can elevate human thought as a transformative mental tool.
- wpietri 4y ago
  For me at least, social media has been a big boon to empathy. It has brought me in contact with so many viewpoints and experiences that are not part of my day-to-day life. Indeed, because of mutual distance, people get to be frank about their worlds in ways that can't be with a neighbor. People can of course use it to construct echo chambers, which don't help empathy. And the rise of "the cruelty is the point" politics surely owes something to the changes in media, but that's harder to untangle.
  - _siis 4y ago
    I think that is a very naive opinion and you are very mistaken but mostly only because you lack an understanding of how diabolical these systems actually are, how they work and are designed. Its not that people could construct echo chambers (as some far off thought), its that they have, and they lied about it to you and everyone else (through omission and redirection), and they continue to do so regularly. If you are on any kind of social media, you are always in an echo chamber. I'm not going to go into all the arguments, you can do your own research, but the two that deserve the most attention are the optimization for engagement which optimizes for both positive and negative content and subversion aspect. Have you ever heard of the Alt-right pipeline? Its becoming fairly well documented, its basically a series of content that after watching, you are shown other content, and that content becomes gradually more and more extreme. Most of the time its very subtle (10 or more steps), and those algorithms and software are designed so you only see content that is optimized in this way, and they intentionally make visible objective video and history limited. You may notice previous watched videos disappear unless you know a direct keyword to locate them again, it was engineered as intended. The way it goes, you might watch a video that pops to the Joel Rogan podcast for a guest speaker you are interested in, that then shows some interesting intellectual things with Jordan Peterson, and after a series of next content, maybe eventually you arrive at David Iccke and his talks about the greys and the reptilians (conspiracy of the Lizard Illimunati), QAnon, Neo nazis, or something else that are extreme or radical (and many steps removed). It sounds crazy, but its been documented. Social media is the perfect propaganda machine, because its a 1 to many platform because there are methods in place to allow someone to dictate what you see, and limit what people see you say (amplification and de-amplification). Policies are geared to allow this weakness by design. You might notice the mass media does the same thing, and you'd be right, but they were less effective for this purpose. As American's we aren't taught a lot about propaganda, which in my opinion does everyone a huge disservice because you can't recognize misinformation and propaganda without knowing what its goals are. Other countries unfortunately have also followed our lead in this regard. Its also difficult to punish entities that push it because its largely considered protected by free speech since Corporations are people. Most people I've met domestically and abroad only have a very naive understanding of what propaganda actually is, and I haven't met a person who could tell me what its goals were when asked. In other more restrictive countries its illegal, and the methods are taught (depending on the country) for their benefit, and it often goes by another name called subversion or more fully ideological subversion. This has been used by all governments, historically, ever since WW2 as the nuclear age became too risky for outright conflict in a MAD world. So non-alerting methods were developed to overthrow foreign governments without war, aimed primarily at manipulating the targeted countries citizens into unrest allowing a small minority to overthrowing the repressive regimes at little loss of life to the country performing these machinations. It is sophisticated and subtle, its strength is it flies in under the radar, and it often employs many well-known psychological blindspots to do this which everyone has. One of the primary targets is often the next generation's children because they lack the critical thinking faculties to discern the threat before age 12 due to developmental biology. Cialdini wrote a book detailing many of those blindspots and examples where they've been used in his book called Influence. The overall goal is, putting you into a psychological state where you can't react, or you react so irrationally that you jump at shadows with little provocation. The intended effect is discord and disunity, so no organized response occurs, and to corrupt aspects that make up a citizens national, religious, or moral identity since this leads to further discord and disunity and these people are unable to recognize truth from fiction in this irrational state. In that kind of diabolical coup, those irrational people are almost always killed later, after a change has been instrumented to solidify the new normal (power structure). If you were taught proper modern history (WW2+), you'd already know a lot of this, but I didn't get that sense from your response (hence my response). This is also why this topic and related references have largely been removed from public education, the same has also occurred regarding socialism's negative aspects in that sphere, and we are seeing a lot of conflict spawned from various movement sponsored ideals that lack true understanding of the underlying philosophy they subscribe to lately which is very worrisome.

neonate 4y ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20221224173133/https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n01/anne-enright/eyes-that-bite http://web.archive.org/web/20221224173133/https://www.lrb.co... https://archive.ph/UWZlY https://archive.ph/UWZlY