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Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

22 points by gus_leonel 2y ago

anovikov 2y ago
"If you really give people what they want, and give them ability to communicate what they want, bad things happen"
- zamadatix 2y ago
  I think it works better if you replace desires with engagement. The biggest problem posed by social media, IMO, is it's optimized towards what keeps people using it the most not necessarily what the users actually want from it. If Jim Bob's photos at the beach is posted after Jim Bob's rant on some political topic you're still pushed to see the rant first and for longer because it's what people engage with the most even if it's what they like the least.
- BizarroLand 2y ago
  I bet part of it is the dopamine response of getting a lot of likes combined with the uncertainty of when or if you'll get it again. That's the crux of the skinner box, right? If you make a post that gets 100+ likes more than usual, it feels good. "I am so smart. I am so clever. Everyone likes me!" you get to say to yourself as the likes roll in. Then, the feeding frenzy is over and you're back to being you. Anything that feels good can be addictive. Get enough people whose whole lives revolve around getting dopamine responses from positive social media interactions and you'll have a bunch of people who have MK Ultra'd themselves into being the zombie patsies of a bot farm who provides them with the dopamine they live for as long as they do the things your bot farm has told them to do. Spin the wheel up enough and let it fly. Rinse and repeat and you can have an army of happy and well-paid misinformation soldiers at your beck and call backed up by a horde of dopamine junkies willing to say or do almost anything to keep the dopamine flowing. It's quite terrifying once you step back far enough to see the whole thing.
cainxinth 2y ago
https://archive.ph/Pxwn4 https://archive.ph/Pxwn4
Suppafly 2y ago
And they are going to continue to be stupid going forward as well :(
dialup_sounds 2y ago
tl;dr - social media
naming_the_user 2y ago
I definitely agree with the idea that social media has created a bunch of "odd" groups and a ton of division, but sometimes I wonder what the alternative is. It seems like prior to social media we had mass media and that served as basically the forcing function, there was a more national concept of shame. Nowadays the concept of social shaming doesn't really work because you have competing factions with belief systems that are so far apart that all you really get is shaming "within the group".
DonnyV 2y ago
This whole article sounds like the US Administrative State complaining they can't control the narrative anymore because all of their "institutions" have been found to be fronts for elites.
mbfg 2y ago
The crazy part of the babel myth is that it tells a store of what seems like the first time in human history where people of all backgrounds came together, lived in peace, made technological progress, and god couldn't stand that, as it wanted the people dumb, scared and fractured. It seems the pattern keeps repeating to today.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Yeah, it's a really surreal bit. The key verse is Gen 11:6: "The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." The use of "the LORD" at the beginning pegs this as a "Jahwist" passage. It was written fairly early on, when Judaism was much less of a monotheistic religion. The next verse is "Let us go down"..." There are various interpretations of "us", but it suggests that it was written when "Jahweh" was one creator deity among others. The same author also wrote the bit about the fall from Eden, the story of Cain, and the story of Noah. In general, it seems like a deity that was big on making judgments about people, and keeping them separate from the realm of the deities. It's a very classic kind of deity, personifying real traits of the world. We've always been "dumb, scared, and fractured", and somebody wanted to tell a story about why that is. There's a weird kind of hope in it: we really could be god-like if we just pulled together. But God really hated us and so he gave us Facebook and Twitter.

22 points by gus_leonel 2y ago

anovikov 2y ago

"If you really give people what they want, and give them ability to communicate what they want, bad things happen"

zamadatix 2y ago
I think it works better if you replace desires with engagement. The biggest problem posed by social media, IMO, is it's optimized towards what keeps people using it the most not necessarily what the users actually want from it. If Jim Bob's photos at the beach is posted after Jim Bob's rant on some political topic you're still pushed to see the rant first and for longer because it's what people engage with the most even if it's what they like the least.
BizarroLand 2y ago
I bet part of it is the dopamine response of getting a lot of likes combined with the uncertainty of when or if you'll get it again. That's the crux of the skinner box, right? If you make a post that gets 100+ likes more than usual, it feels good. "I am so smart. I am so clever. Everyone likes me!" you get to say to yourself as the likes roll in. Then, the feeding frenzy is over and you're back to being you. Anything that feels good can be addictive. Get enough people whose whole lives revolve around getting dopamine responses from positive social media interactions and you'll have a bunch of people who have MK Ultra'd themselves into being the zombie patsies of a bot farm who provides them with the dopamine they live for as long as they do the things your bot farm has told them to do. Spin the wheel up enough and let it fly. Rinse and repeat and you can have an army of happy and well-paid misinformation soldiers at your beck and call backed up by a horde of dopamine junkies willing to say or do almost anything to keep the dopamine flowing. It's quite terrifying once you step back far enough to see the whole thing.

cainxinth 2y ago

https://archive.ph/Pxwn4 https://archive.ph/Pxwn4

Suppafly 2y ago

And they are going to continue to be stupid going forward as well :(

dialup_sounds 2y ago

tl;dr - social media

naming_the_user 2y ago

I definitely agree with the idea that social media has created a bunch of "odd" groups and a ton of division, but sometimes I wonder what the alternative is. It seems like prior to social media we had mass media and that served as basically the forcing function, there was a more national concept of shame. Nowadays the concept of social shaming doesn't really work because you have competing factions with belief systems that are so far apart that all you really get is shaming "within the group".

DonnyV 2y ago

This whole article sounds like the US Administrative State complaining they can't control the narrative anymore because all of their "institutions" have been found to be fronts for elites.

mbfg 2y ago

The crazy part of the babel myth is that it tells a store of what seems like the first time in human history where people of all backgrounds came together, lived in peace, made technological progress, and god couldn't stand that, as it wanted the people dumb, scared and fractured. It seems the pattern keeps repeating to today.

jfengel 2y ago
Yeah, it's a really surreal bit. The key verse is Gen 11:6: "The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." The use of "the LORD" at the beginning pegs this as a "Jahwist" passage. It was written fairly early on, when Judaism was much less of a monotheistic religion. The next verse is "Let us go down"..." There are various interpretations of "us", but it suggests that it was written when "Jahweh" was one creator deity among others. The same author also wrote the bit about the fall from Eden, the story of Cain, and the story of Noah. In general, it seems like a deity that was big on making judgments about people, and keeping them separate from the realm of the deities. It's a very classic kind of deity, personifying real traits of the world. We've always been "dumb, scared, and fractured", and somebody wanted to tell a story about why that is. There's a weird kind of hope in it: we really could be god-like if we just pulled together. But God really hated us and so he gave us Facebook and Twitter.