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I agree with you and I think it shows a deeper problem. The media has been trying to train people to think in terms of good and bad associations, instead of fac

I agree with you and I think it shows a deeper problem. The media has been trying to train people to think in terms of good and bad associations, instead of facts and logic. Some people, as well as AI, have fallen into the mindset that you should judge things based on their associations with other things - if you're associated with something good, you're good, if you're associated with something bad, you're bad. Once the way your reasoning works is that you assume everyone's dumb, everyone's thinking with incredibly simplified associations, then you're eventually going to fight against reasoning and intelligent thinking because that requires a more complex view of the world. And the media has been training people to think with associations and brands. You're trained that orange man bad by constant bombardment of negative associations. You're trained that secure elections are bad, by labelling exposing fraud as conspiracy theories, and labeling insecure election methods as "right to vote". Your reasoning is shortcutted to an associate with some misleading brand coined by the media, and these brands are reinforced by being constantly present with high frequency in your training set. You're trained that the true meaning of democracy, rule of the people, is populism. Instead, you get a different brand of "democracy" which is "representation", and which is fulfilled by the media cherry picked corrupt person of the right skin color or sex. So when this guy here disagrees with you on ambiguity of this factually correct statement, and implicitly assumes causual connection by association, it's because people are trained, daily, to always assume causal connection by association. If you ever use logic that offends the associative mindset, they are trained to associate with you negatively as well. The goal is to replace language between people with likes, emojis and dumb animalistic associations, and leave the language to the narrative shapers to tell you what to do. If you do meet someone, even if you speak to him and try to convey information, all they'll hear are negatively associated words, which they are already conveniently trained to ignore and stop listening.

revelio 3y ago
Yes, though perhaps the word trained makes it sound more deliberate than it is. I think it's more that rational thinking is hard but schools teach people that it's easy: just attend, get a fancy bit of paper and now you're rational! So people get that credential then fall back on fast-mode thinking that's all based on associations and other shortcuts, whilst telling themselves they're in slow mode all the time. The result is a discourse dominated by irrational reasoning of the form, I felt X when Y said Z, therefore Z is a bad thing and Y is a bad person. The possibility that the listener lacks emotional self control or reasoning just doesn't come up, and nobody will be brave enough to suggest it. Hence the argument that seems to be being made by this paper: if someone hears a statement and infers something from it that wasn't actually said, then the speaker is being ambiguous and they should do better. Presumably by attempting to guess at every possible misread of what they said, including malicious misreads, and painstakingly spell out everything they are not saying (which won't matter, because the fact that they have to deny it will be taken as evidence about what they really think). Whereas maybe we'd be better off if listeners learned to check their assumptions.

revelio 3y ago

Yes, though perhaps the word trained makes it sound more deliberate than it is. I think it's more that rational thinking is hard but schools teach people that it's easy: just attend, get a fancy bit of paper and now you're rational! So people get that credential then fall back on fast-mode thinking that's all based on associations and other shortcuts, whilst telling themselves they're in slow mode all the time. The result is a discourse dominated by irrational reasoning of the form, I felt X when Y said Z, therefore Z is a bad thing and Y is a bad person. The possibility that the listener lacks emotional self control or reasoning just doesn't come up, and nobody will be brave enough to suggest it. Hence the argument that seems to be being made by this paper: if someone hears a statement and infers something from it that wasn't actually said, then the speaker is being ambiguous and they should do better. Presumably by attempting to guess at every possible misread of what they said, including malicious misreads, and painstakingly spell out everything they are not saying (which won't matter, because the fact that they have to deny it will be taken as evidence about what they really think). Whereas maybe we'd be better off if listeners learned to check their assumptions.