4 ms·

Another victim of the sort of epistemic closure which is peculiar to our times: Search engines are not optimized to give you the truth, they are optimized to g

by rhelz 3y ago

Another victim of the sort of epistemic closure which is peculiar to our times: Search engines are not optimized to give you the truth, they are optimized to give you what you are looking for. Which means that if you are looking for reasons to be pessimistic, you can find endless websites which will tell you why you should be pessimistic. And vice versa, of course. Things are rarely as good as they seem, but they are rarely as bad as they seem either.

panarky 3y ago
> Things are rarely as good as they seem, but they are rarely as bad as they seem either What you're describing is called "normalcy bias" or "negative panic". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias During an unfolding crisis or disaster, 80% of people minimize genuine threat indicators and consistently underestimate the probability and consequences of the disaster. Most people tend to cherry-pick the positive indicators to pay attention to, while ignoring or minimizing the negative indicators. For the referenced article, a reasonable person who is not operating under normalcy bias might contradict the author's evidence, logic and assertions with different evidence, logic and assertions. But to just dismiss all of it with a wave of the hand and a one-sentence heuristic is the very essence of normalcy bias.
- rhelz 3y ago
  chuckle well, I certainly would have refuted his evidence and arguments if he had given any! Instead, he just rehearses a jumble of pessimistic conclusions from what he himself describes as coming from "diverse disciplinary directions" and that "the causal diagnoses differ somewhat." I.e. the article just a grab-bag of quotes from talking heads who agree neither on the cause of the crisis, nor the nature of the crisis, nor what we should be doing to advert the crisis. The only thing they have in common is their marketing strategy: you can sell more books if you get people all riled up. For example, Daniels cites Howe as predicting that we are due for a "turning", a "bone-jarring Crises" like there was in the 1760s, 1850s and 1920s". Um. Ok, that really narrows it down, eh? :-) Sounds suitably bombastic, but oh-so-conveniently ambiguous. No matter what happens, he can claim he predicted it, because surely it will have something in common with either 1760, or 1850, or 1920....And Howe's knock-down proof? Well, history follows "saeculum" of 80 years or so. A pseudo-scientific term for when one generation dies off and is replaced by another... great rhetoric, but there's no "there" there. And the rest of the article just adds ambiguity to ambiguity. I.e. Daniels doesn't lay out any coherent case. The only common theme of his citations is pessimism, and not even pessimism about the same things! I.e. what brings it all together isn't any rational reason. Daniels is a super-smart guy who is generally very rational, but when you are depressed, the whole world seems depressing. And being in a pessimistic mood makes pessimistic conclusions seem salient and cumulative, even if they really are not. Can't blame him, we've all been through a lot the past couple of years, but its important to be able to catch yourself when you are in one of these loops and not let it overwhelm you, especially when there's really no rational reason to do so. Its a pretty extraordinary hypothesis that we are so inevitably doomed to crisis that just giving up (as he says in his title) is a rational response, I think we have the right to demand some pretty extraordinary evidence, don't you?
wslh 3y ago
It would be great to hear about your point of view beyond the mass media and search engine issues.
- rhelz 3y ago
  chuckle, well as easy as it is to fool yourself with a search engine, at least a search engine didn't just make stuff up--somebody had to actually create a web site advocating the position you wanted to fool yourself into believing. But LLMs face no such restriction :-) I mean, Michael Cohen just got in trouble for citing non-existent court cases. We are at the point where a lawyer smart enough to represent the president of the united states cannot tell the difference between real and hallucinated arguments. LLMs amplify, automate, and mass produce our ability to fool ourselves into believing what we desperately want to be true. It's scary, but I don't want to fall into the same trap that Mitch Daniels did in the OP, and conclude that an epistemic apocalypse is inevitable. Eventually, we will all acquire the necessary skepticism to not fall victim, the same way we learned to cope with chain letters, "satanic panic" over D&D, and other parasitical side effects of new technology and changing times.

by rhelz 3y ago

panarky 3y ago

> Things are rarely as good as they seem, but they are rarely as bad as they seem either What you're describing is called "normalcy bias" or "negative panic". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias During an unfolding crisis or disaster, 80% of people minimize genuine threat indicators and consistently underestimate the probability and consequences of the disaster. Most people tend to cherry-pick the positive indicators to pay attention to, while ignoring or minimizing the negative indicators. For the referenced article, a reasonable person who is not operating under normalcy bias might contradict the author's evidence, logic and assertions with different evidence, logic and assertions. But to just dismiss all of it with a wave of the hand and a one-sentence heuristic is the very essence of normalcy bias.

rhelz 3y ago
chuckle well, I certainly would have refuted his evidence and arguments if he had given any! Instead, he just rehearses a jumble of pessimistic conclusions from what he himself describes as coming from "diverse disciplinary directions" and that "the causal diagnoses differ somewhat." I.e. the article just a grab-bag of quotes from talking heads who agree neither on the cause of the crisis, nor the nature of the crisis, nor what we should be doing to advert the crisis. The only thing they have in common is their marketing strategy: you can sell more books if you get people all riled up. For example, Daniels cites Howe as predicting that we are due for a "turning", a "bone-jarring Crises" like there was in the 1760s, 1850s and 1920s". Um. Ok, that really narrows it down, eh? :-) Sounds suitably bombastic, but oh-so-conveniently ambiguous. No matter what happens, he can claim he predicted it, because surely it will have something in common with either 1760, or 1850, or 1920....And Howe's knock-down proof? Well, history follows "saeculum" of 80 years or so. A pseudo-scientific term for when one generation dies off and is replaced by another... great rhetoric, but there's no "there" there. And the rest of the article just adds ambiguity to ambiguity. I.e. Daniels doesn't lay out any coherent case. The only common theme of his citations is pessimism, and not even pessimism about the same things! I.e. what brings it all together isn't any rational reason. Daniels is a super-smart guy who is generally very rational, but when you are depressed, the whole world seems depressing. And being in a pessimistic mood makes pessimistic conclusions seem salient and cumulative, even if they really are not. Can't blame him, we've all been through a lot the past couple of years, but its important to be able to catch yourself when you are in one of these loops and not let it overwhelm you, especially when there's really no rational reason to do so. Its a pretty extraordinary hypothesis that we are so inevitably doomed to crisis that just giving up (as he says in his title) is a rational response, I think we have the right to demand some pretty extraordinary evidence, don't you?

wslh 3y ago

It would be great to hear about your point of view beyond the mass media and search engine issues.

rhelz 3y ago
chuckle, well as easy as it is to fool yourself with a search engine, at least a search engine didn't just make stuff up--somebody had to actually create a web site advocating the position you wanted to fool yourself into believing. But LLMs face no such restriction :-) I mean, Michael Cohen just got in trouble for citing non-existent court cases. We are at the point where a lawyer smart enough to represent the president of the united states cannot tell the difference between real and hallucinated arguments. LLMs amplify, automate, and mass produce our ability to fool ourselves into believing what we desperately want to be true. It's scary, but I don't want to fall into the same trap that Mitch Daniels did in the OP, and conclude that an epistemic apocalypse is inevitable. Eventually, we will all acquire the necessary skepticism to not fall victim, the same way we learned to cope with chain letters, "satanic panic" over D&D, and other parasitical side effects of new technology and changing times.