15 ms·

Dots Will Be Connected

91 points by longdefeat 4y ago

h2odragon 4y ago
> rather than saying that we are all conspiracy theorizers now, I should say that we are all, from someone’s perspective, cult members now. I should start promoting a Church of Objective Reality. The main tenet of faith will be that there is a shared, objective reality; which we experience in individually distinct ways. The main requirement for membership will be regular donations; after all, what the point of group action anymore if not personal gain?
- jeezfrk 4y ago
  the point? maybr the elevation of human perspective above selfish bias.
  - readthenotes1 4y ago
    Our glorious leader is trying to help you achieve that as well by having you give him the money you are so selfishly holding on to
    - h2odragon 4y ago
      money is the root of all Evil. Allow me to Protect you from the Evil by taking the Money from you...
ggm 4y ago
Somebody like Richard Dawkins is missing from the conversation. I believe he pointed out once that in a 300m person economy, million-to-one chances might happen 300 times, albeit to 300 somebodies out there, not you, all things being equal. It's like the observational biasses which go to "busses come in threes" or "the other lane is always moving faster" aren't being integrated into thinking. Dots will be connected. OMG! every ancestor I ever had lead directly to me! it must be in the plan..
- ttctciyf 4y ago
  Buses do come in threes, at least according to Transit vehicles’ headway distribution and service irregularity[1] as cited in [2] 1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12469-010-0024-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12469-010-0024-7 2: https://theconversation.com/transport-experts-explain-why-buses-come-in-threes-and-which-one-you-should-get-on-99348 https://theconversation.com/transport-experts-explain-why-bu...
FeepingCreature 4y ago
We may be inundated with too much data, and more information may not improve our situation, but appointing any person or institution to limit our information inflow will certainly worsen things. I fully stand with thezvi's points over at https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/on-investigating-conspiracy-theories/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/on-investigating-con... ; especially 1 to 3: 1. Think for yourself, shmuck! 2. When it seems worthwhile, do your own research. 3. The ones telling you not to ‘do your own research’ are probably the baddies.
- jl6 4y ago
  Doing your own research is a great idea and more people should do it! Reading the existing literature and keeping up to date with new publications; studying the general subject area for, say, 3 years to get to at least an undergraduate level of understanding; studying statistics and experimental design; planning experiments and analysis and obtaining critical feedback from peers to mitigate the chance of errors; attempting to reproduce the results of others working in this area…
  - mihaic 4y ago
    Ditto, all this is exactly what I do when I want to try some new type of chocolate bar from the supermarket, and want to understand the nutritional, economic and moral implications of what I'm doing.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - chrisco255 4y ago
    Come now, there are certainly heuristics with which you move about and make decisions in the world every day without investing 3 years a piece on. And even when you desire to seek the advice of some trusted expert, you rely on heuristics and biases to inform your decision on which one to trust.
    - 4y ago
Animats 4y ago
The short version, from a reference in the article. “The primary purpose of narrative,” media scholar Katherine Hayles argued several years ago, “is to search for meaning,” which makes “narrative an essential technology for human beings, who can arguably be defined as meaning-seeking animals.” His "narrative vs database" essay talks around the problem. Narratives tend to discuss causation, either explicitly or by implication. Raw data does not contain causation information. That's the real distinction here. We know that humans are hard-wired to find causation, even when it may not exist.[1] This has survival value. In a hostile environment, an excessive false alarm rate is better for survival than missing a threat. If you do correlation on enough data, you find what looks like causation. Often it's just noise. This is a well known phenomenon. Intelligence analysts, investment quants, and people who analyze research data have to be trained to watch for it. Most people don't have that kind of training. Under information overload, this gets worse. Combine this with the human tendency to find causation when it doesn't exist, and you get false narratives. Even without wishful thinking or bias. It's not mysterious. It's how human brains work. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4008651/pdf/nihms569501.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4008651/pdf/nih...
- noobker 4y ago
  You appear to be strawmaning this piece to a large degree. The necessity for humans to find meaning isn't ignored or argued as anything other than "how human brains work", in the piece. The Database metaphor isn't a separation of raw data from narrative -- it's recognizing that in the modern zeitgeist, the abundance of data is so vast that a new experience has emerged that supersedes any Narrative, that's the Database: a super collection of all raw data as well as the known paths through it. The existence of the Database then calls into question the validity of any one Narrative, and the rest of the piece follows. * No need to reference NIH.
tonetheman 4y ago
[dead]
eesmith 4y ago
> “When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition." — Marshall McLuhan Can anyone provide context for that? The only attributed source I can find for it is Joel Stein's 2019 "In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book", which says it's from a 1968 Canadian TV show. I can't track down which one, much less find a recording of it. Digging more, I found that Douglas Coupland's 2010 "Marshall McLuhan : you know nothing of my work!" (see https://archive.org/details/marshallmcluhany0000coup/page/n9/mode/2up?q=%22too+much+information%2C+they+instantly+resort+to+pattern+recognition%22 https://archive.org/details/marshallmcluhany0000coup/page/n9... ) gives a slightly longer albeit unattributed quote: "When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns." Yet the linked-to essay refers to "conspiracy theorizers" and "cult members", not "artists", which suggests that McLuhan had a different view on the topic. A text search of McLuhan's 1964 "Understanding Media" finds "pattern recognition" used twice: 1) Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM. When data move instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope with data at electric speed in typical situations of “information overload,” men resort to the study of configurations, like the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelstrom. The drop-out situation in our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the “mythic” world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted. As one IBM executive puts it, “My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one.” 2) "We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction. As the means of input increase, so does the need for insight or pattern recognition." - https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mars_s3z9/page/n11/mode/2up?q=pattern https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mars_s3z9/pa... This further supports my interpetation that McLuhan sees pattern recognition as something useful, not as something for conspiracy theorizers and cult members. This review of McLuhan's book, https://archive.org/details/everymansmcluhan0000gord/page/80/mode/2up?q=resort https://archive.org/details/everymansmcluhan0000gord/page/80... , seems to agree, saying "The book’s relentless blizzard of ideas illustrates one of its own key points: faced with information overload, the mind must resort to pattern recognition to achieve understanding." Also, "connecting dots" brings to mind "ley lines" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line), and Matt Parker's discovery that "Woolworths stores follow uncanny geometrical patterns." (http://web.archive.org/web/20100812112158/http://www.standupmaths.com:80/woolworths/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100812112158/http://www.standup...). Alfred Watkins didn't need digital databases to connect those dots back in the 1920s.
spirographer 4y ago
Brilliant synthesis: Globally humans have transitioned almost overnight from information/knowledge scarcity to information flood. Once we had plenty of time to forage information to construct narratives and share them and agree/disagree on them before the next influx. Now we are literally waterboarded with information that has no context, minimal sharing and no real conversation attached. We are left with whatever individual narrative our pattern matching can construct, and it's usually inadequate. Narrative is definitely a superpower of the group not the individual. We may need to wait a generation until people who have grown up in this world and can filter feed on the information can create/disseminate narrative adapted to the new rate of information flow and yet somehow true to reality.
- noobker 4y ago
  The situation invites comparisons to the obesity epidemic or perhaps (more of a stretch) the introduction of alcohol into American tribes. Regardless, it's critical to recognize that we as a people need to develop a greater worldview/metacognition to go any further forward together.
  - mwigdahl 4y ago
    Or, even more pessimistically, the introduction of oxygen into the atmosphere by cyanobacteria in the Great Oxygenation Event.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    > it's critical to recognize that we as a people need to develop a greater worldview/metacognition to go any further forward together. Possibly, but the chances of a move towards a cohesive worldview seem fleeting at best. If anything it seems more likely that we'll continue to fragment further and even more rapidly. We had a chance at this during the pandemic - humanity could have come together to fight a common enemy (the virus) but instead we fractured into groups and fought each other.
    - thegrim22 4y ago
      This is contrary to the article, you're assuming everyone involved scanned the deluge of information and the only "rational" result would be to come to the same conclusion about an insanely complex situation as you did, whereas the article argues that there's so much information and so many dots that people scan the same wealth of data and come to different conclusions.
lsm07 4y ago
This guy is just another jackass running cover for the regime. "Let the experts do the data analysis for you!" You think running this program still works after the past 6 years? Why are "high IQ" people so unbelievably daft?
- Zetice 4y ago
  Consider for a moment that "Let the experts do the data analysis for you!" may be a much kinder way of saying, "You're too uneducated to understand the data and will with a high degree of certainty screw up the analysis!" As George Carlin famously says, "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." Half!
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    The problem is not one of qualifications, but of motivation and trust. Even if you genuinely believe the organization before you is filled with nothing but the brightest individuals in the world, leagues beyond your understanding in their field, it means absolutely nothing if you don't trust them. In fact it would mean less than nothing, as there's nothing scarier than a clever individual with "impaired" ethical values. Trust is difficult to earn, and easily lost. And we live in a society where, for most, trust is gone. The way to get it back is through extreme transparency and coming from a point of view of understanding this distrust.
    - Zetice 4y ago
      Trust isn’t so easily lost when you understand the lack of certainty in this world. So then, who benefits from offering certainty, if it’s more or less impossible to obtain?
      - blangk 4y ago
        Everyone does. That's why its such a popular tactic, but trust is so hard. That is the reason for transparency.
nerdponx 4y ago
> Pointing out ‘the other side are conspiracy theorists’ or ‘the people who believe this also believe these other terrible things’ does not prove the other side is wrong, nor is it going to convince anyone on the other side that they are wrong. It is completely legitimate in my opinion to use "the people who believe this also believe these other terrible things" as an argument against the possible motivations of the people who believe whatever the current thing is. Imagine a conspiracy theory that Jack and the Beanstalk was a true story, which was suppressed by the medieval Church, in order to restrict public access to the great riches of Heaven and keep them for the Church only. Let's say also that a large number of prominent and long-standing Jack&Beanstalk truth researchers also happen to be extreme right-wing xenophobic nationalists, some of whom have publicly posted really disgusting bigoted things on Pleroma. No matter how compelling the J&B evidence is, in my opinion it's both intellectually rational and morally appropriate to question the entire J&B conspiracy theory. Who benefits by promoting the theory? What worldview does it support? What worldview does the traditional narrative ("it's a fairy tale") contradict?
m3kw9 4y ago
Sometimes you just have to believe in something as you won’t be able to verify it. The quake in Turkey, real or not? Yeah is probably real but no you have not seen it or experienced it, but you know is way too much evidence from different news sources to be fake and no reason to fake it as far as you are concerned. How about balloons where the US is saying is a spy device but China is saying is for weather and was blown off course? Same idea us you were not there when the ballon was made or you did not see what they recovered. There is lots of incentives for either country to blow this either way, I would just not choose a side till more events that can connect the dots that makes it very unlikely it isn’t real. Again you will never be able to verify but you have to see a mountain of evidence from many sources to gauge likelihood
- klysm 4y ago
  Epistemology is hard but for some reason it doesn’t seem to be addressed directly frequently.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  You can usually find "truth" relatively easily by seeing what two opposing sides tend to agree on. Sometimes they'll both be wrong, but more often than not they're probably right. So both the US and China claim there was a Chinese made balloon and the US shot it down. So it's pretty safe to say that's all true. Was it a weather balloon or a spy balloon? This is where the key point is a willingness to accept uncertainty. But I do not agree on the 'preponderance of sources' argument as a means to finding truth. As a contemporary example, consider the COVID lab leak stuff. You had large numbers of scientists making declarations in journals that it was literally impossible, fact checkers declaring the concept clearly debunked, government calling it dangerous disinformation, the media running endless stories calling anybody who dared even think about a lab leak as little more than crazy conspiracy theorists of the flat earth type, and more. Until one day, everything changed and the lab leak was perfectly okay to discuss. There was no silver bullet, just a geopolitical recalculation. And it turns out among those scientists were people directly involved COVID related gain of function research. Those journals somehow couldn't discover such an absurd undeclared conflict of interest, even though a simple search or CV reference would tell all. The media suddenly did a hard 180, and you even had mainstream outlets actively mocking how absurdly "obviously true" it was that the virus came from a lab leak. We live in an era of disinformation being coordinated and deployed at scale, and now human-like text-generation is about to enter the picture. When my logic runs contrary to a million sources - I'm going with myself. If I'm wrong, at least I believed something that I felt seemed like the truth, and could presumably defend. By contrast believing in something that seems false (and increasingly often turns out to be) simply because of a mountain of pressure? That would feel just awful to me.
Zetice 4y ago
I fed this to ChatGPT and asked for a summary, and got something a lot easier for me to understand than the article itself. Maybe I'm a dummy! But it helped. (edit: the below is not ChatGPT's response!) The article presupposes there's anxiety, indecision, uncertainty, and frustration as a result of collecting more data, but this isn't a given. Instead, a better solution would be to simply observe; you're not being asked to make decisions, you're not being asked for certainty or clarity, the reality is you don't meaningfully matter to almost any of what's being shown to you in media, and almost nothing being shown matters to you. Caring and feeling empathy towards those negatively impacted by something is one thing, but your job is not to solve those problems in any real, if-you-dont-then-no-one-will sense. You can do your small, tiny part (e.g. throw $5 at a relief fund, be kind/forgiving to those who do get hurt, use your vote to improve the way your government handles those situations, etc.) but there's no big, sweeping act you're being asked to perform. The narrative is irrelevant. The "connected dots" are irrelevant. If you want to live a happier life while still being informed, then you must stop trying to understand everything. Just observe, accept you're mostly powerless, and do the tiny amount you can to ease the burden of those who get harmed by the stuff you read about.
- dnissley 4y ago
  Wow, chatgpt really told the author to go touch grass.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    I didn't paste the ChatGPT response in here (doesn't feel healthy to HN to flood it with ChatGPT responses), I wrote that myself.
    - dnissley 4y ago
      Ah, disappointing! In all seriousness, I have found the conclusions you drew from your chatgpt summary to be quite useful for making my way in this particular era of history. Being able to just evict any such controlling narrative from my head has prevented me from severely losing touch with actual reality, which I have sadly seen happen to more and more folks in recent times. This has ultimately made me a much more "reasonable" person, but at the cost of having many hard convictions that I'm willing to "unreasonably" stand my ground on. Being able to be stubborn like that can occasionally be a force for good (e.g. civil rights movement), but can also lead to personal ruin, not unlike bashing one's head into a concrete wall trying to move it. This has led me to think really hard about what convictions I do hold dear. I haven't come up with many, but so far I'm leaning a lot on "don't treat people like objects".
xrd 4y ago
This is a great article, it made me really think about my own propensity to connect the dots. And, without considering my biases and limited knowledge, so that those dots are driven into connections in the only way they could, and often not to the truth. Then, I thought: thank god we have now have search engines with AI, AI that can summarize and connect the dots for us! Oh, wait...

91 points by longdefeat 4y ago

> rather than saying that we are all conspiracy theorizers now, I should say that we are all, from someone’s perspective, cult members now. I should start promoting a Church of Objective Reality. The main tenet of faith will be that there is a shared, objective reality; which we experience in individually distinct ways. The main requirement for membership will be regular donations; after all, what the point of group action anymore if not personal gain?

jeezfrk 4y ago
the point? maybr the elevation of human perspective above selfish bias.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  Our glorious leader is trying to help you achieve that as well by having you give him the money you are so selfishly holding on to
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    money is the root of all Evil. Allow me to Protect you from the Evil by taking the Money from you...

ggm 4y ago

Somebody like Richard Dawkins is missing from the conversation. I believe he pointed out once that in a 300m person economy, million-to-one chances might happen 300 times, albeit to 300 somebodies out there, not you, all things being equal. It's like the observational biasses which go to "busses come in threes" or "the other lane is always moving faster" aren't being integrated into thinking. Dots will be connected. OMG! every ancestor I ever had lead directly to me! it must be in the plan..

ttctciyf 4y ago
Buses do come in threes, at least according to Transit vehicles’ headway distribution and service irregularity[1] as cited in [2] 1: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12469-010-0024-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12469-010-0024-7 2: https://theconversation.com/transport-experts-explain-why-buses-come-in-threes-and-which-one-you-should-get-on-99348 https://theconversation.com/transport-experts-explain-why-bu...

FeepingCreature 4y ago

We may be inundated with too much data, and more information may not improve our situation, but appointing any person or institution to limit our information inflow will certainly worsen things. I fully stand with thezvi's points over at https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/on-investigating-conspiracy-theories/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/on-investigating-con... ; especially 1 to 3: 1. Think for yourself, shmuck! 2. When it seems worthwhile, do your own research. 3. The ones telling you not to ‘do your own research’ are probably the baddies.

jl6 4y ago
Doing your own research is a great idea and more people should do it! Reading the existing literature and keeping up to date with new publications; studying the general subject area for, say, 3 years to get to at least an undergraduate level of understanding; studying statistics and experimental design; planning experiments and analysis and obtaining critical feedback from peers to mitigate the chance of errors; attempting to reproduce the results of others working in this area…
- mihaic 4y ago
  Ditto, all this is exactly what I do when I want to try some new type of chocolate bar from the supermarket, and want to understand the nutritional, economic and moral implications of what I'm doing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- chrisco255 4y ago
  Come now, there are certainly heuristics with which you move about and make decisions in the world every day without investing 3 years a piece on. And even when you desire to seek the advice of some trusted expert, you rely on heuristics and biases to inform your decision on which one to trust.
  - 4y ago

Animats 4y ago

The short version, from a reference in the article. “The primary purpose of narrative,” media scholar Katherine Hayles argued several years ago, “is to search for meaning,” which makes “narrative an essential technology for human beings, who can arguably be defined as meaning-seeking animals.” His "narrative vs database" essay talks around the problem. Narratives tend to discuss causation, either explicitly or by implication. Raw data does not contain causation information. That's the real distinction here. We know that humans are hard-wired to find causation, even when it may not exist.[1] This has survival value. In a hostile environment, an excessive false alarm rate is better for survival than missing a threat. If you do correlation on enough data, you find what looks like causation. Often it's just noise. This is a well known phenomenon. Intelligence analysts, investment quants, and people who analyze research data have to be trained to watch for it. Most people don't have that kind of training. Under information overload, this gets worse. Combine this with the human tendency to find causation when it doesn't exist, and you get false narratives. Even without wishful thinking or bias. It's not mysterious. It's how human brains work. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4008651/pdf/nihms569501.pdf https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4008651/pdf/nih...

noobker 4y ago
You appear to be strawmaning this piece to a large degree. The necessity for humans to find meaning isn't ignored or argued as anything other than "how human brains work", in the piece. The Database metaphor isn't a separation of raw data from narrative -- it's recognizing that in the modern zeitgeist, the abundance of data is so vast that a new experience has emerged that supersedes any Narrative, that's the Database: a super collection of all raw data as well as the known paths through it. The existence of the Database then calls into question the validity of any one Narrative, and the rest of the piece follows. * No need to reference NIH.

tonetheman 4y ago

[dead]

eesmith 4y ago

> “When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition." — Marshall McLuhan Can anyone provide context for that? The only attributed source I can find for it is Joel Stein's 2019 "In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book", which says it's from a 1968 Canadian TV show. I can't track down which one, much less find a recording of it. Digging more, I found that Douglas Coupland's 2010 "Marshall McLuhan : you know nothing of my work!" (see https://archive.org/details/marshallmcluhany0000coup/page/n9/mode/2up?q=%22too+much+information%2C+they+instantly+resort+to+pattern+recognition%22 https://archive.org/details/marshallmcluhany0000coup/page/n9... ) gives a slightly longer albeit unattributed quote: "When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns." Yet the linked-to essay refers to "conspiracy theorizers" and "cult members", not "artists", which suggests that McLuhan had a different view on the topic. A text search of McLuhan's 1964 "Understanding Media" finds "pattern recognition" used twice: 1) Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM. When data move instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope with data at electric speed in typical situations of “information overload,” men resort to the study of configurations, like the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelstrom. The drop-out situation in our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the “mythic” world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted. As one IBM executive puts it, “My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one.” 2) "We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction. As the means of input increase, so does the need for insight or pattern recognition." - https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mars_s3z9/page/n11/mode/2up?q=pattern https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mars_s3z9/pa... This further supports my interpetation that McLuhan sees pattern recognition as something useful, not as something for conspiracy theorizers and cult members. This review of McLuhan's book, https://archive.org/details/everymansmcluhan0000gord/page/80/mode/2up?q=resort https://archive.org/details/everymansmcluhan0000gord/page/80... , seems to agree, saying "The book’s relentless blizzard of ideas illustrates one of its own key points: faced with information overload, the mind must resort to pattern recognition to achieve understanding." Also, "connecting dots" brings to mind "ley lines" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line), and Matt Parker's discovery that "Woolworths stores follow uncanny geometrical patterns." (http://web.archive.org/web/20100812112158/http://www.standupmaths.com:80/woolworths/ http://web.archive.org/web/20100812112158/http://www.standup...). Alfred Watkins didn't need digital databases to connect those dots back in the 1920s.

spirographer 4y ago

Brilliant synthesis: Globally humans have transitioned almost overnight from information/knowledge scarcity to information flood. Once we had plenty of time to forage information to construct narratives and share them and agree/disagree on them before the next influx. Now we are literally waterboarded with information that has no context, minimal sharing and no real conversation attached. We are left with whatever individual narrative our pattern matching can construct, and it's usually inadequate. Narrative is definitely a superpower of the group not the individual. We may need to wait a generation until people who have grown up in this world and can filter feed on the information can create/disseminate narrative adapted to the new rate of information flow and yet somehow true to reality.

noobker 4y ago
The situation invites comparisons to the obesity epidemic or perhaps (more of a stretch) the introduction of alcohol into American tribes. Regardless, it's critical to recognize that we as a people need to develop a greater worldview/metacognition to go any further forward together.
- mwigdahl 4y ago
  Or, even more pessimistically, the introduction of oxygen into the atmosphere by cyanobacteria in the Great Oxygenation Event.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  > it's critical to recognize that we as a people need to develop a greater worldview/metacognition to go any further forward together. Possibly, but the chances of a move towards a cohesive worldview seem fleeting at best. If anything it seems more likely that we'll continue to fragment further and even more rapidly. We had a chance at this during the pandemic - humanity could have come together to fight a common enemy (the virus) but instead we fractured into groups and fought each other.
  - thegrim22 4y ago
    This is contrary to the article, you're assuming everyone involved scanned the deluge of information and the only "rational" result would be to come to the same conclusion about an insanely complex situation as you did, whereas the article argues that there's so much information and so many dots that people scan the same wealth of data and come to different conclusions.

lsm07 4y ago

This guy is just another jackass running cover for the regime. "Let the experts do the data analysis for you!" You think running this program still works after the past 6 years? Why are "high IQ" people so unbelievably daft?

Zetice 4y ago
Consider for a moment that "Let the experts do the data analysis for you!" may be a much kinder way of saying, "You're too uneducated to understand the data and will with a high degree of certainty screw up the analysis!" As George Carlin famously says, "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." Half!
- somenameforme 4y ago
  The problem is not one of qualifications, but of motivation and trust. Even if you genuinely believe the organization before you is filled with nothing but the brightest individuals in the world, leagues beyond your understanding in their field, it means absolutely nothing if you don't trust them. In fact it would mean less than nothing, as there's nothing scarier than a clever individual with "impaired" ethical values. Trust is difficult to earn, and easily lost. And we live in a society where, for most, trust is gone. The way to get it back is through extreme transparency and coming from a point of view of understanding this distrust.
  - Zetice 4y ago
    Trust isn’t so easily lost when you understand the lack of certainty in this world. So then, who benefits from offering certainty, if it’s more or less impossible to obtain?
    - blangk 4y ago
      Everyone does. That's why its such a popular tactic, but trust is so hard. That is the reason for transparency.

nerdponx 4y ago

> Pointing out ‘the other side are conspiracy theorists’ or ‘the people who believe this also believe these other terrible things’ does not prove the other side is wrong, nor is it going to convince anyone on the other side that they are wrong. It is completely legitimate in my opinion to use "the people who believe this also believe these other terrible things" as an argument against the possible motivations of the people who believe whatever the current thing is. Imagine a conspiracy theory that Jack and the Beanstalk was a true story, which was suppressed by the medieval Church, in order to restrict public access to the great riches of Heaven and keep them for the Church only. Let's say also that a large number of prominent and long-standing Jack&Beanstalk truth researchers also happen to be extreme right-wing xenophobic nationalists, some of whom have publicly posted really disgusting bigoted things on Pleroma. No matter how compelling the J&B evidence is, in my opinion it's both intellectually rational and morally appropriate to question the entire J&B conspiracy theory. Who benefits by promoting the theory? What worldview does it support? What worldview does the traditional narrative ("it's a fairy tale") contradict?

m3kw9 4y ago

Sometimes you just have to believe in something as you won’t be able to verify it. The quake in Turkey, real or not? Yeah is probably real but no you have not seen it or experienced it, but you know is way too much evidence from different news sources to be fake and no reason to fake it as far as you are concerned. How about balloons where the US is saying is a spy device but China is saying is for weather and was blown off course? Same idea us you were not there when the ballon was made or you did not see what they recovered. There is lots of incentives for either country to blow this either way, I would just not choose a side till more events that can connect the dots that makes it very unlikely it isn’t real. Again you will never be able to verify but you have to see a mountain of evidence from many sources to gauge likelihood

klysm 4y ago
Epistemology is hard but for some reason it doesn’t seem to be addressed directly frequently.
somenameforme 4y ago
You can usually find "truth" relatively easily by seeing what two opposing sides tend to agree on. Sometimes they'll both be wrong, but more often than not they're probably right. So both the US and China claim there was a Chinese made balloon and the US shot it down. So it's pretty safe to say that's all true. Was it a weather balloon or a spy balloon? This is where the key point is a willingness to accept uncertainty. But I do not agree on the 'preponderance of sources' argument as a means to finding truth. As a contemporary example, consider the COVID lab leak stuff. You had large numbers of scientists making declarations in journals that it was literally impossible, fact checkers declaring the concept clearly debunked, government calling it dangerous disinformation, the media running endless stories calling anybody who dared even think about a lab leak as little more than crazy conspiracy theorists of the flat earth type, and more. Until one day, everything changed and the lab leak was perfectly okay to discuss. There was no silver bullet, just a geopolitical recalculation. And it turns out among those scientists were people directly involved COVID related gain of function research. Those journals somehow couldn't discover such an absurd undeclared conflict of interest, even though a simple search or CV reference would tell all. The media suddenly did a hard 180, and you even had mainstream outlets actively mocking how absurdly "obviously true" it was that the virus came from a lab leak. We live in an era of disinformation being coordinated and deployed at scale, and now human-like text-generation is about to enter the picture. When my logic runs contrary to a million sources - I'm going with myself. If I'm wrong, at least I believed something that I felt seemed like the truth, and could presumably defend. By contrast believing in something that seems false (and increasingly often turns out to be) simply because of a mountain of pressure? That would feel just awful to me.

Zetice 4y ago

I fed this to ChatGPT and asked for a summary, and got something a lot easier for me to understand than the article itself. Maybe I'm a dummy! But it helped. (edit: the below is not ChatGPT's response!) The article presupposes there's anxiety, indecision, uncertainty, and frustration as a result of collecting more data, but this isn't a given. Instead, a better solution would be to simply observe; you're not being asked to make decisions, you're not being asked for certainty or clarity, the reality is you don't meaningfully matter to almost any of what's being shown to you in media, and almost nothing being shown matters to you. Caring and feeling empathy towards those negatively impacted by something is one thing, but your job is not to solve those problems in any real, if-you-dont-then-no-one-will sense. You can do your small, tiny part (e.g. throw $5 at a relief fund, be kind/forgiving to those who do get hurt, use your vote to improve the way your government handles those situations, etc.) but there's no big, sweeping act you're being asked to perform. The narrative is irrelevant. The "connected dots" are irrelevant. If you want to live a happier life while still being informed, then you must stop trying to understand everything. Just observe, accept you're mostly powerless, and do the tiny amount you can to ease the burden of those who get harmed by the stuff you read about.

dnissley 4y ago
Wow, chatgpt really told the author to go touch grass.
- Zetice 4y ago
  I didn't paste the ChatGPT response in here (doesn't feel healthy to HN to flood it with ChatGPT responses), I wrote that myself.
  - dnissley 4y ago
    Ah, disappointing! In all seriousness, I have found the conclusions you drew from your chatgpt summary to be quite useful for making my way in this particular era of history. Being able to just evict any such controlling narrative from my head has prevented me from severely losing touch with actual reality, which I have sadly seen happen to more and more folks in recent times. This has ultimately made me a much more "reasonable" person, but at the cost of having many hard convictions that I'm willing to "unreasonably" stand my ground on. Being able to be stubborn like that can occasionally be a force for good (e.g. civil rights movement), but can also lead to personal ruin, not unlike bashing one's head into a concrete wall trying to move it. This has led me to think really hard about what convictions I do hold dear. I haven't come up with many, but so far I'm leaning a lot on "don't treat people like objects".

xrd 4y ago

This is a great article, it made me really think about my own propensity to connect the dots. And, without considering my biases and limited knowledge, so that those dots are driven into connections in the only way they could, and often not to the truth. Then, I thought: thank god we have now have search engines with AI, AI that can summarize and connect the dots for us! Oh, wait...