7 ms·

It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources thr

by bux93 2y ago

It's not what you know, but who you know. Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots, while the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group. The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group. Whether the memes you consume are in print is entirely incidental.

ndjdjddjsjj 2y ago
Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.
- mihaic 2y ago
  If drugs flood my community, you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh". If you put the burden on the population when everything in society works against them, it's not productive in any way.
  - nverno 2y ago
    > you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh" But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      But it's not an individual problem! Me not doing drugs doesn't prevent me from being impacted by people who do, and the same goes for people who consume poisoned information sources.
      - nverno 2y ago
        I mean, it's both right? It's easier to work on fixing policy if you're not a drug addict reading poisoned info.
        mihaic 2y ago
        Sure, it is both. And in this type of situations I think the more important one to tackle is the systemic one, so that putting the burden on the individual is made manageable. To give another analogy, if you want people to recycle, you need to create recycling stations in their area, and not force them to drive 50 kilometers to recycle a plastic bottle. That burden of infrastructure is on the government unfortunately in some part.
        TeMPOraL 2y ago
        The individual solution is insufficient in this case. Once a problem like this becomes a strong signal at the level of population statistics, it means there's a systemic cause that's stronger than most people's willpower.
  - ndjdjddjsjj 2y ago
    My main point is there isn't some Illuminati with access to good info you can't get for free. In the drug analogy I am saying most addicts know about rehab. The conspiricy isn't hiding all the NA groups.
    - exceptione 2y ago
      You would have a better main point when you started to question how this accident could happen: Oh oopsie, I am the owner of highly popular media, that by accident does everything to not talk about subjects that are highly damaging for society, but that, if they would, would be highly detrimental to my and my business partners interests. Also, by accident, instead of bringing real investigative journalism looking at the big picture, my media brings a firehose of addictive, emotionial pulp of no relevance. The problem is: we are naturally attracted to junk that tickles are emotional belief systems, for example some ideas we have about immigrants. It takes active THINKING to go against your gut feeling. How do you do that when you 1. were never taught to take that painful step of doubting your deepest held memes 2. were brainwashed by endless affirmation via infotainment 3. are living in an infotainment environment were half of your countrymen believe things like "the election was stolen"? You are proposing to bank on someone already deeply burdened by debt.
      - ndjdjddjsjj 2y ago
        I can't engage with this unless I talk politics... and my views (based on calling spades spades) wont be popular with anyone on any side ;). So will leave it there and say yes it is unfortunate. r/leopardsatemyface sums it up though (although I don't blindly agree with all that is posted there)
  - blackoil 2y ago
    Society is flush with lots of drugs tobacco, alcohol, sugar, junk food, social media, reels... At society level, better laws and campaigns may work best but at individual level you'll get best ROI by focusing efforts on disciplining yourself and your family and friends.
mandmandam 2y ago
> the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them: * Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons. * Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures. * Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion. Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.
- exe34 2y ago
  profit. they have the best information money can buy and they use it to make profit. Hanlon's razor doesn't take into account the fact that they have a perfect motive.
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    > a perfect motive It comes across almost trite, but it's still perfectly relevant: > Canada [and The West], the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. - Alanis Obomsawin This isn't rare or hidden knowledge. Billions of people know this for a fact. Versions of this phrase go back well over a hundred years. Yet the media and political classes do everything they can to diminish such "sentiment" as "naive" and "childish" "wishful thinking"; with or without the tacit understanding that this is what their owners demand.
    - cafard 2y ago
      Will the last tree be cut? New England has much more three cover than it has a couple hundred years ago.
cess11 2y ago
You really think the elites are generally better informed than the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities, gossip media and so on? I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  "Elite" has so many meanings, it is near worthless without some tight context. Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much. On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely. I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more. They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them. I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept. People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.
  - cess11 2y ago
    Power, like money, is mainly inherited.
    - FredPret 2y ago
      This sounds more like a slogan, a belief, than a fact. It’s not true for the extreme top end: [0] Here’s a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper middle class: [1] We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing everything. This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are replaced. What may fool you though is that all successful people are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle). But they are not the same people. [0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-lessons-160025947.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...
alexashka 2y ago
> Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots Tautology. > The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group There is no causal link here. It's been important to be at the right place (group) at the right time always. Social media being more or less addictive or existing at all changes this banality not.

by bux93 2y ago

ndjdjddjsjj 2y ago

Well just change your URL to something better, right. The curse is not the lack of information but the lack of will to change the channel from whatever feeds their (our!) biases.

mihaic 2y ago
If drugs flood my community, you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh". If you put the burden on the population when everything in society works against them, it's not productive in any way.
- nverno 2y ago
  > you can't say the solution is simply "just don't do drugs, duh" But that is obviously the solution at the individual level, and it is always productive to put the burden of solving your own problems on yourself like OP suggests.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    But it's not an individual problem! Me not doing drugs doesn't prevent me from being impacted by people who do, and the same goes for people who consume poisoned information sources.
    - nverno 2y ago
      I mean, it's both right? It's easier to work on fixing policy if you're not a drug addict reading poisoned info.
      - mihaic 2y ago
        Sure, it is both. And in this type of situations I think the more important one to tackle is the systemic one, so that putting the burden on the individual is made manageable. To give another analogy, if you want people to recycle, you need to create recycling stations in their area, and not force them to drive 50 kilometers to recycle a plastic bottle. That burden of infrastructure is on the government unfortunately in some part.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        The individual solution is insufficient in this case. Once a problem like this becomes a strong signal at the level of population statistics, it means there's a systemic cause that's stronger than most people's willpower.
- ndjdjddjsjj 2y ago
  My main point is there isn't some Illuminati with access to good info you can't get for free. In the drug analogy I am saying most addicts know about rehab. The conspiricy isn't hiding all the NA groups.
  - exceptione 2y ago
    You would have a better main point when you started to question how this accident could happen: Oh oopsie, I am the owner of highly popular media, that by accident does everything to not talk about subjects that are highly damaging for society, but that, if they would, would be highly detrimental to my and my business partners interests. Also, by accident, instead of bringing real investigative journalism looking at the big picture, my media brings a firehose of addictive, emotionial pulp of no relevance. The problem is: we are naturally attracted to junk that tickles are emotional belief systems, for example some ideas we have about immigrants. It takes active THINKING to go against your gut feeling. How do you do that when you 1. were never taught to take that painful step of doubting your deepest held memes 2. were brainwashed by endless affirmation via infotainment 3. are living in an infotainment environment were half of your countrymen believe things like "the election was stolen"? You are proposing to bank on someone already deeply burdened by debt.
    - ndjdjddjsjj 2y ago
      I can't engage with this unless I talk politics... and my views (based on calling spades spades) wont be popular with anyone on any side ;). So will leave it there and say yes it is unfortunate. r/leopardsatemyface sums it up though (although I don't blindly agree with all that is posted there)
- blackoil 2y ago
  Society is flush with lots of drugs tobacco, alcohol, sugar, junk food, social media, reels... At society level, better laws and campaigns may work best but at individual level you'll get best ROI by focusing efforts on disciplining yourself and your family and friends.

mandmandam 2y ago

> the haves get their information from trustworthy sources through their in-group Then why are their actions more harmful than any other class? I see them: * Starting proxy wars, fueling climate doubt, lobbying/destroying governments to allow every kind of degradation of every commons. * Paying people 6 or 7 figures to confuse and divide the people earning 5 or 6 figures. * Apparently utterly ignorant of their legacy, which will be one of murderous self-interest and absurd delusion. Do all their "trustworthy sources" feed their biases and class interests, their self-delusions, their greed? It's astounding how people can have all the facts and teachers in the world, while dodging genuine understanding of everything most important.

exe34 2y ago
profit. they have the best information money can buy and they use it to make profit. Hanlon's razor doesn't take into account the fact that they have a perfect motive.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  > a perfect motive It comes across almost trite, but it's still perfectly relevant: > Canada [and The West], the most affluent of countries, operates on a depletion economy which leaves destruction in its wake. Your people are driven by a terrible sense of deficiency. When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. - Alanis Obomsawin This isn't rare or hidden knowledge. Billions of people know this for a fact. Versions of this phrase go back well over a hundred years. Yet the media and political classes do everything they can to diminish such "sentiment" as "naive" and "childish" "wishful thinking"; with or without the tacit understanding that this is what their owners demand.
  - cafard 2y ago
    Will the last tree be cut? New England has much more three cover than it has a couple hundred years ago.

cess11 2y ago

You really think the elites are generally better informed than the rest? They don't fall prey to stuff like celebrities, gossip media and so on? I haven't seen any sign that this is the case among politicians where I live, or among the few quite rich people I've looked into the lives of, mainly through their email and interviews. Compared to the leftists in my "in-group" they're generally very uncritical, poorly informed and pretty narcissistic.

Nevermark 2y ago
"Elite" has so many meanings, it is near worthless without some tight context. Most people who are really good at something, and became successful for it, primarily became good by doing. Some of those people read and developed complex thought, and likely and rightly give great credit to that. But many others? Not so much. On the other hand, I think the quality (or the direction of quality) of a society as a whole has a very strong correlation with the percentage of people who read deeply and widely. I am not only surprised by how simplistic many people's views and reasoning are, but how unaware they are of the world. And how unaware they are that there are people around them that know so much more. They are not just myopic, they don't have a map, and are unaware other people have them and expand them. I had a desktop wallpaper of a visualization of a large part of the universe, the beautiful webbing and voids, where galaxies are pixels or less. An aquaintance asked what it was. When I told her, she stared at it like her brain had just crashed. She couldn't process, couldn't believe, the picture, the concept. People unfamiliar with that artifact is no big deal. But people not having anything to mentally connect it to when they encounter it is scary.
- cess11 2y ago
  Power, like money, is mainly inherited.
  - FredPret 2y ago
    This sounds more like a slogan, a belief, than a fact. It’s not true for the extreme top end: [0] Here’s a Yahoo Finance article citing several efforts to investigate inheritance vs self-made wealth in the upper middle class: [1] We keep electing new politicians and buying the latest and greatest thing. Technology keeps revolutionizing everything. This leads to a ton of churn at the top as incumbents are replaced. What may fool you though is that all successful people are similar in important ways (Anna Karenina principle). But they are not the same people. [0] https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/billionaires-self-made [1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-lessons-160025947.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/79-millionaires-self-made-les...

alexashka 2y ago

> Any type of mass-media is fodder for the have-nots Tautology. > The more addictive facebook, tiktok and twitter are, the bigger the premium is of being part of the right group There is no causal link here. It's been important to be at the right place (group) at the right time always. Social media being more or less addictive or existing at all changes this banality not.