How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/how-to-stay-sane-in-a-world-that-rewards-insanity

by enbywithunix • 8 months ago

360 236 8 months ago

The author writes, “You end up in a world where changing your mind becomes impossible because you've built your entire identity around being right”. Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue (e.g. pro-Ukraine to anti-Ukraine or vice versa) and still keep their following and ability to monetize it.

Social media is full of parasocial relationships; followers are in love with an influencer’s personality, not their views or factual content. So, the influencer can completely change his mind about stuff, as long as he still has the engaging presentation that people have come to like. Followers are also often in love with the brand relationships that the influencers flog, because people love being told what stuff they should buy.

volkk3• 8 months ago

the words we use matter a lot. the "pro" and "anti" anything is a pretty large reason why all discourse has become so stupid sounding and talking with people about any issue is enraging. nuance is dead. the cultural zeitgeist is being controlled by algorithmic feeds that create neuroticism (i am definitely affected), general anxiety, and anger.

robot-wrangler3• 8 months ago

My take on this is that persons are great, everyone should know a few. Groups of people on the other hand are, and always have been, genuinely pretty awful in almost every way. IMHO this is down to some really basic primate stuff that's just inevitable. Social media is a big problem because it makes it easier to create groups, and algorithms are a big problem because they essentially take all of the dynamics that would inevitably lead to conflict anyway, and accelerate them.

Groups, algorithms, and conflict itself are all things that lead to wicked problems. Each one tends to spiral, where the only solution is more of the same, and if you escape one funnel then you fall into an adjacent one. Problem: Some group is against me. Solution: Create a group to bolster my strength. Problem: People are fighting. Solution: Join the fight so the fight will stop sooner. Problem: My code is too complicated to understand. Solution: More code to add logging and telemetry. Problem: Attempting to add telemetry has broken the code. Solution: Time to start a fight

pengaru• 8 months ago

People are also more isolated than ever, positioning them poorly for having robust real relationships. This makes them vulnerable to mistaking "influencers" as their friends.

sandinmyjoints• 8 months ago

Yeah, "You cannot be reasonable in isolation" from the article really struck me.

astroflection• 8 months ago

Yet social-media personalities regularly do a 180° turn on some issue ... and still keep their following and ability to monetize it.

And they asserted that they were totally right the entire time. That's how. And the sheep kept on following them.

BLKNSLVR3• 8 months ago

There are / were a couple of right-wing shillers that were literally paid to promote Russian talking points and they just fit it right into their schtick without blinking.

Nothing on the internet is real. If it wants money or opinion or attention, consider it hostile and try to find the strings (although it's generally not worth the time to try and find the strings, just move on and do something productive instead).

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5100829/russia-election...

JohnMakin• 8 months ago

I have been a small content creator for 10 years now. I've been hampered a lot by actively discouraging these types of parasocial relationships - every now and then I'll get a gaggle of followers that spend entirely too much time on my crappy content or my personality/posts and I get extremely weirded out to the point I want to stop doing it entirely. Everyone tells me I'm doing it wrong, but I swear, 10 years ago it wasn't as much of a thing to create a cult around yourself on social media or streaming platforms. Now it's the primary monetization path.

I've even gone so far to say to more than one person, "look, I like and appreciate you really like my content or my personality, but, you don't know me at all, I don't know you, and honestly, we're not friends, no matter how much you want that to be the case. That isn't to say I dislike you, but you need to be more realistic about the content you consume, and if this hurts your feelings a lot, I'm sorry, but this content probably isn't for you."

Then there's the type of content creator that gets a following by being a huge jerk to their fans - I don't like that either. I just tell them to treat it like a TV show. It's not real, the character in the show doesn't know you or like you. Unfortunately for today's youth and media landscape this is an utterly foreign concept.

sizzle• 8 months ago

Can we like and subscribe to you? Post the link

alexachilles90• 8 months ago

It's more about being confident and extreme on their stance no matter what it is at that particular moment. People are attracted to personalities that are confident and says they are right all the time. Heck, personalities like that gets all the influence in the workplace too. Imagine John Doe in your office who has a solution for every problem and knows the code base like the back of their hand. You might find that they are not so right all the time (maybe 2 out of 3 times it's pure conjecture) but gosh you will go back to him for solutions the next time you run into a problem. What I am saying is that we are attracted to the extreme, the flamboyant, the controversial. Maybe it's time we prioritize critical thinking for the future generation no?

cal_dent2• 8 months ago

I see it as the continued corporatisation of everything. I suspect that you'd be hard press to find anyone who has ever been anywhere above middle-management in a corporate organisation who doesnt see, and chuckles at, the similarities in the worst places they've worked and this:

"Where admitting uncertainty is social suicide. Where every conversation is a performance for your tribe rather than an actual exchange of ideas. You lose the ability to solve problems that don't fit neatly into your ideological framework, which turns out to be most important problems"

Politics is the obvious one to see this effect in action but it's bled into so many facet of society now because society is one giant grey areas but our mediums don't like greys. The medium continues to be the message.

rsynnott2• 8 months ago

But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.

The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.

lazide4• 8 months ago

However, there are fewer articulate (and internally consistent) defenses of flat earth theory, than say… particle physics. In my experience.

Plenty of timecube style ones, however.

rsynnott2• 8 months ago

That's true, but if you want one, you can find one. If you've conditioned yourself to think that articulate==credible, then sometimes it only takes one.

whatshisface• 8 months ago

Yes, and this is not just due to the intelligence of the "believers" but due to the fact that describing 2=2=2 in a self-consistent way only takes understanding it while describing 2=2=3 in a way that appears self-consistent requires a true rhetorical genius.

corpMaverick• 8 months ago

Not all the flat earthers are true believers. Some are there just for the attention or other motives.

dylan604• 8 months ago

Even with the number of articulate examples like this are far out numbered by the number of inarticulate arguments that the rule still has merit. Exceptions do not make the rule bad.

Kye• 8 months ago

A good rule can be a bad heuristic. In my experience this one misleads more often than it informs.

y0eswddl2• 8 months ago

Ezra Klein's book why we're polarized cover this a bit and basically studies show that intelligence level has little to do with what people believe and more so just affects their ability to defend whichever position they already hold.

hexator7• 8 months ago

Speaking of people who are very articulate and also very wrong.

mikepurvis• 8 months ago

Indeed, and an articulate, confident defense can also be that much more insidious. I never found it hard to ignore obviously bad-faith talking heads on cable news, but when someone is on a podcast conversation with a host I like, it's much easier to nod along until that moment where they say something demonstrably false and I have to rewind my brain a minute or two to be like... wait a sec, what? How did you get to that position?

potato37328422• 8 months ago

The idea that being articulate implies intelligence and/or sanity is very common, but really a bit weird. You can find plenty of articulate defences of, say, flat earth theory.

The author has to say this because the consumers of the author's content would stop being right if the author was constantly dropping truth bombs like "being articulate doesn't make you right" they wouldn't get liked, retweeted, shared, and circle jerked about in the comment section on the front page of HN.

Literally every content creating person or company with an established fan base is in this quandary. If Alex Jones said "hey guys the government is right about this one" or Regular Car Reviews said "this Toyota product is not the second coming of christ" they'd hemorrhage viewers and money so they cant say those things no matter how much they personally want to. Someone peddling platitudes to people who fancy themselves intellectuals can't stop any more than a guy who's family business is concrete plants can't just decide one day to do roofing.

beepbooptheory2• 8 months ago

Alex Jones literally did this though starting around 2016.

This is a strong argument probably but strangely aimed here. Reading the article, it does seem like you and the author agree about everything in this regard? You are kind of just rearticulating one part of their argument as critique about them. Why?

Or where do we place the reflex here? What triggered: this author is BS, is pseudointellectual, is bad. We jump here from a small note about articulation and intelligence, to what seems like this massive opportunity to attack not only that argument, but the author, the readers, everyone. Why? Does the particular point here feel like a massive structural weakness?

What was the trigger here for you, for lack of better word? Why such a strong feeling?

thisisbrians• 8 months ago

Yes, it's easy to cherry-pick an obviously absurd position that could be articulately argued. But the point is that you are definitely wrong about some things and should generally keep an open mind. Even intelligent people are wrong about certain things, and in fact their propensity for rationalization can lead them into some absurd positions. But some of those positions turn out to be right, like the Earth orbiting the Sun, for example.

spencerflem4• 8 months ago

For example, the author is articulate and wrong about needing to give consideration to republicans :p

atmavatar• 8 months ago

The grandparent's point is that articulate prose is irrelevant to the strength/correctness of the argument or intelligence of the author.

I would take it a step further and include that it has no bearing on the morality of the author.

The original claim was:

But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.

In truth, it does no such thing. Articulate arguments serve neither as proof the person making it isn't a monster nor that they are particularly intelligent or knowledgeable about that which they argue.

Though, I would also point out that monsters can occasionally be right as well.

morellt• 8 months ago

Absolutely agree. Many, many abhorrent ideas and perspectives are accepted very often due to them being deliberately well thought-out and appearing more "academic" sounding to the layperson. There are entire organizations (colloquially, "think-tanks") dedicated to writing pamphlets, books, and memos filled with eloquent in-depth talking points that get distributed to their respective talking heads. I can't blame many people today for seeing this problem as the foundation of all mainstream media, instead of taking the time to individually investigate each source of information. However it does lead to this "everything is the opposite of what we're told" hysteria the author talks about

astura2• 8 months ago

Yeah, that really stood out to me, I feel certain positions are monstrous no matter how articulately stated. Saying something really mean in a more palatable way doesn't make it (or the speaker) less mean.

This seems like a cognitive bias on the author that they are mistaken for universal truth.

lazide4• 8 months ago

The challenge is that short-term incentives can easily lead to long-term problems, as the short-term min/maxing can leave you stuck in a particular global minimum, with no clear way out.

Arainach2• 8 months ago

the short-term min/maxing can leave you stuck in a particular global minimum, with no clear way out.

Short term min/maxing leaves you in a local maximum (the opposite of what you said)

lazide4• 8 months ago

Local maximum != global maximum (usually).

I said global minimum, which can easily happen if you end up at local maximum, but you’ll never know unless you randomly search elsewhere (and potentially end up even lower).

micromacrofoot3• 8 months ago

A lot of this goes away when you stop spending so much time on social media, which is a very poor reflection of "reality." Part of the problem is that there are a number of people who can't really look away, because they've built their livelihoods on it. Traditional media in many ways has come to rely on it too. Unfortunate mistake.

Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway. Just take a look at how the story around the Epstein files changes with the way the wind blows. It feels very familiar to the "Narcissist's Prayer."

bwfan123• 8 months ago

from the article.

The returns on reasonableness have almost entirely collapsed

If you measure returns by others' approval, then you are doomed as the world is fickle. Unfortunately, as a writer or journalist you are forced to depend on approval of others.

The alternative is to sculpt a framework or scorecard largely independent of what others think - but this is hard, as we are social creatures.

micromacrofoot3• 8 months ago

as a writer or journalist you are forced to depend on approval of others

and sometimes the disapproval of others, as we've seen with the sort of rage-baiting headlines many blogs, social media accounts, and even traditional media outlets, are writing

and the thing is... this approval/disapproval reaction isn't elicited to necessarily build coalitions, make friends, or change minds, it's often built to sell eyes-on-ads which is a completely perverse incentive that has eaten the mainstream internet

VintageRobot3• 8 months ago

There is a large number of people that appreciate being told the truth. That model actually works better over the long term.

Grifting (which is what is often seen on social media platforms by many of the personalities) can give you large rewards quickly however you are always at risk at being found out. Once they are exposed, it is often usually over for them.

VintageRobot3• 8 months ago

A lot of this goes away when you stop spending so much time on social media, which is a very poor reflection of "reality."

It mainly "too much time of political social media". You can always tell.

What you find is that a lot of people will be repeating talking points and/or catch phrases without putting much thought into it. A lot of this is fed to them by people who are essentially evangelists and many of these people I am convinced are given they talking points, because they all say the same thing at roughly the same time.

Prominent figures on social media change their minds all the time, but they'll re-sculpt their reality around the basis that they were always right anyway

They can do that if they are getting a decent turnover of new viewers. That doesn't work too well when their fanbase is declining.

If you look into the UFO land which is the worst for this and the most obvious because often the claims are ridiculous. What often happens is that someone will be outright exposed for being a fraud e.g. someone proves that a video was fake. They will then disappear for a few months or maybe a few years. During that time, many more new people would have filtered into the community and many won't look into that person's background.

spectralista• 8 months ago

I haven't used social media in over a decade and I change my mind all the time. Changing your mind is a good thing for a thinking being.

Social media figures aren't changing their mind in the same way, they are changing and optimizing their public performance.

Professional social media is a paid performance. We understand that Tom Cruise is not really a highly skilled jet fighter pilot but a well paid actor playing the role of one. No one cares what Tom Cruise thinks about Ukraine/Russia air defense tactics. This gets hidden in plain sight with social media though and why social media is hyper stupifying.

micromacrofoot3• 8 months ago

Right, it's not so much "changing minds" in that they probably aren't thinking about much very deeply... it's more like "changing to suit the popular narrative direction"

charlesabarnes• 8 months ago

I think disengaging from social media is a big part of this. These advertiser and engagement fueled algorithms promote all of the insane takes as well. You find much more fulfillment engaging with people locally or people in your close circles.

AndrewKemendo5• 8 months ago

I’m not on social media unless you consider HN social media (I don’t) and the world is still totally as insane as it was before the internet.

For your average city person:

The food you’re offered is sugar + preservatives, the water is either non-existent (Tehran) or poisoned with fracking gas (Flint), almost all local communities have collapsed into extreme versions of themselves, the rich and poor still don’t mingle, men fear women and women want nothing to do with men, there is no upside to having a family or children.

I just spoke at a HBS event in DC last night about robotics and on one side of the room were people starting AI companion services and in the other side people were saying AI was causing the rise of Tradwives. It was like looking at 50 “deer in headlights” when explaining how thoroughly they have already integrated third party algorithmic logic into their decision processes - and are totally unaware of it.

The real world is absurd and getting less coherent with more information available. Humans aren’t biologically equipped for the world we collectively built.

volkk3• 8 months ago

there is no upside to having a family or children

what exactly does this even mean?

dfedbeef3• 8 months ago

You think Tehran and Flint are good cases for 'average city'?

rizwank• 8 months ago

Man, I’d love to hear that talk.

JKCalhoun3• 8 months ago

Your disconnect from Social Media and "the world still totally insane"—the latter is of course not dependent on the former. Perhaps we need to get the rest of the world also off Social Media? Off the internet?

Given that we can't do that, I choose then to continue my hobbies, take more walks, try to declutter my place, improve my health, lose weight, look for comfortable chats with my daughters, wife, friends…

I'm not sure where you see men and women not trusting one another. If I had to guess it would be that you perceive this from things you have seen on the internet?

I find the internet is kind of like that silly cave in "The Empire Strikes Back"—where you find only what you bring with you. Try looking for positive things and people and see if you are not rewarded. (And if you cannot, just drop the internet completely. I have a friend that I think checks online for about 30 minutes in the morning and then he's done for the day.)

heisgone• 8 months ago

A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.

I'm a long time Jon Stewart fan and if I'm being honest, looked at the "other side" as if it was a bunch of retarded people isn't new and predate 2016. No doubt Trump and social media got conservative to embrace condescending and extreme rhetoric and pushed it to another level but let's not pretend they invented anything.

hexator7• 8 months ago

Not sure what the point of this is other than to complain about being out of touch with the world. Too many people think "diversifying your information" means subscribing to whatever drivel they find on substack instead of, you know, following a diverse set of _actual journalists_.

HeinzStuckeIt2• 8 months ago

Over the last many years, newspapers have slashed actual journalists in a number of areas: investigative reporting, arts, local news. A lot of those actual journalists have moved to Substack in order to maintain some kind of career writing about the subject they love.

For me, the tragedy of Substack isn’t that it consists of purely unserious people. It’s that fine journalists go there because, with the death of open-web blogging, there’s a feeling that there is no where else to go. And then, once there, they start to pick up all kinds of bad behaviors that both Substack the for-profit corporate owner and its culture of writers and commenters encourage.

hexator7• 8 months ago

That's true, the point I was making was that it's about you decide to trust with sending you news not just the outlet. The problem is that many people who are rightfully distrustful of traditional media end up following cranks. And Substack seems to be the place where the cranks hang out.

BugsJustFindMe• 8 months ago

I have a hard time taking this kind of enlightened-centrist both-sides gruel very seriously. Calling every strong position "extreme" is a classic sleight-of-hand maneuver by people who want to mask their own wrong-side-of-history beliefs that they know they should feel ashamed of expressing.

Yes, yes, look for truth beyond labeled groups, but pretending that the "sides" are equal is some utterly moronic "Fair and Balanced" bullshit.

it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons.

Many issues really do have a bright dividing line. I mean, for fuck's sake, there are people who are currently fighting against releasing the Epstein files, documents that clearly incriminate pedophilic rape and sex trafficking.

One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent.

I think the author here doesn't actually understand what manufactured consent is, because believing otherwise demonstrates media illiteracy. Talking about our extreme filter bubbles (community/information homogeneity) in one breath and then denying the pervasiveness of manufactured consent in the next is otherwise a perfect demonstration of Gell-Mann amnesia.

upstairs_key• 8 months ago

This is a common misconception about what it means to be against political extremes.

It does not mean "both sides have a point".

It does not mean "both sides" are equally bad.

It does not even mean that there are necessarily two sides.

The term "centrist" is used to imply and reinforce these misconceptions, encouraging people toward extremes. When you see things in black and white, of course everything is a straight line from good to evil (with you at the far end of good), so if someone only partially agrees with you, they're in the "center" and that much closer to Hitler than you. It's hard to step outside of this fantasy. But I'll try to help you.

Imagine the following dialogue.

A: "Are you Hindu or Muslim?"

B: "Neither. I'm an atheist."

A: "Oh, so you are torn between Vishnu and Muhammad."

And yes, one of the political parties is significantly more deranged than the other right now. You don't need to be extreme to see that and it is possible to vote for the more reasonable party without drinking their kool-aid.

GaryBluto2• 8 months ago

"enlightened-centrist" and "both-sides(ism)" are phrases left-leaning people use to try and say "My team good, your team bad, to believe anything else is insanity/stupidity!" without coming off as a douchebag. (It doesn't work)

array_key_first5• 8 months ago

If you don't want to release the Epstein files, then yeah, you're bad.

If you're 'both side'-ing fucking pedophilia, take a step back and ask yourself - what the fuck are we doing here?

Sometimes people, and this includes republicans, are just pieces of shit. Sometimes someone is OBVIOUSLY wrong, and someone is OBVIOUSLY right. You are allowed to diverge from the fucking hivemind and say 'you know what, this republican sucks'.

Trump sucks man. He's a legitimately bad person and a stain on humanity. There is no alternative perspective to that. If you try to argue one, that's suspicious!

cruffle_duffle• 8 months ago

It isn’t “us vs them”. It’s just “us”.

Mainstream media and social media polarize the fuck out of us and make everything so fucking toxic and tribal. Snap out of it!

We are all just people trying to make our way in this world with imperfect information and no instruction manual.

josefritzishere• 8 months ago

Being reasonable is basicaly the core requirement of civilization. If your culture is incapable of tolerance or variation it's also incapable of growth. It gets locked in a cyclical purity test and collapse.

paganel• 8 months ago

One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent

Where's the lie in that? Hasn't this lady read her Gramsci? Seems like she didn't.

Tech writer (Wired, TIME, TNW), angel investor, CMO

I see now, for sure she hasn't read her Gramsci.

hexator7• 8 months ago

This person doesn't seem aware of their contradictions in both complaining about people not following diverse viewpoints and also downright dismissing any amount of self-reflection that might be coming from people to their left.

mock-possum• 8 months ago

The writer who says "this issue has nuance and I can see valid concerns on multiple sides" gets a pat on the head and zero retweets.

Because I think at this point ‘both sides ism’ Is easily recognizable as a dead end rhetorical strategy. At best it’s an ignorant position, at worst it’s low effort engagement bait / concern trolling that actively sabotages progress.

MarkusQ3• 8 months ago

The phrase/concept "both side ism" is a very clever bait and switch that, so far as I can tell, was designed to marginalize/discredit people who are trying to actually engage with the issues (instead of just toxically emoting), and it was avidly adopted and weaponized as such. By both sides.

array_key_first5• 8 months ago

No, moderatism or centrism is legitimately a fallacy. The idea or intuition that, given two endpoints, the most correct position is one in the middle, is a fallacy. It depends entirely on the endpoints.

For example: the three fifths compromise. Turns out, bad. The correct answer was emancipation all along, and the 'centrist' answer was just bad. Because, well, one of the endpoints was slavery. If you 'halfway' slavery, that's still bad. There's no merits or 'well what about's when it comes to slavery.

That doesn't mean centrists or moderates are wrong - they're often right. But it DOES mean that just taking a middle of the road approach isn't reasonable. You need to actually understand why you're doing that, and why the middle makes the most sense. In some parts of the world, right now, as in right now right now, the 'both sides' argument is pro-genocide. In the past it's been pro-slavery, pro-colonialism, pro-holocaust, whatever. Plenty of really bad stuff.

So, you can't hide behind 'both sides'. You need to justify WHY 'both sides' and why in the middle is best for this particular case.

kentm• 8 months ago

In my opinion, the problem is that journalists in general used “both sides” rhetoric where it wasn’t warranted to avoid accusations of bias. It feels that nuance is used out of cowardice more often than not.

There’s also the fact that not all positions are equally valid or evidence based. Nuance doesn’t mean treating each position as equally valid, but evaluating each on the evidence. Journalists almost uniformly mistake “both sides” for nuance. There’s nuance in discussions about global warming, but treating “global warming is not man made” as a valid position is not an example of that.

Nuance is definitely something we need more of, but we also need to call a spade a spade more often.

BrenBarn2• 8 months ago

The boy who cried "there's a wolf on both sides!"

oytis2• 8 months ago

I don't quite get the connection between the premise and the conclusion. Sure, influencers get rewarded by social media algorithms for polarising content, but most people are not influencers.

wnevets• 8 months ago

but most people are not influencers.

they either get elected or appointment to the government

korse• 8 months ago

most people are not influencers.

Perhaps, but many are. They just don't have much reach or don't use a digital platform.

JKCalhoun3• 8 months ago

And the influenced are rewarded by the influencer that is validating their polarized views.

You also might be putting too fine a point on "influencer". A relative of mine on Facebook might be a kind of "influencer"—at least with regard to his small cadre of family and friends that follow him.

oytis2• 8 months ago

You can look at it it this way, but why your small circle of family and friends would reward polarizing opinions? If anything, I have seen people losing real life relationships by not knowing when to stop in online arguments

parpfish• 8 months ago

i found it weird that this person has multiple friends that were able to "make bank" by having polarizing opinions. i know a ton of folks with polarizing opinions and none of them are monetizing it.

what kind of world is this author living in where their social circle includes so many influencers that are cashing in on social media?

IncreasePosts• 8 months ago

I assume it was the author ratting on themselves and their para social relationships. I'm guessing "friend" here is a person the author follows on Twitter and occasionally exchanges a DM with

biophysboy6• 8 months ago

The main issue for me is the size of our platforms.

If the owner of a platform tries to enforce a set of virtues, it will always be seen as censorship by a fraction of its users. That fraction will increase as the user base increases, as the alternatives diminish, and as the owners govern with more impunity.

I personally think these loud users are immature, disrespectful, anonymous cowards, but my opinions are irrelevant — the important thing is that large platforms are politically unstable.

The solution to this is to fragment the internet. Unfortunately, this is incompatible with the information economies of scale that underpin the US economy. In my opinion, our insanity is an externality of the information sector, much like obesity for staple goods or carbon dioxide for energy.

I don’t agree with these individualized how-to guides. I can turn my phone off and go outside, but I still have to live in a world informed by social-media sentiment.

baxuz• 8 months ago

Nah, the solution is deanonymization.

People with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies should not be given a safe space.

EdgeExplorer• 8 months ago

Facebook has a real name policy and is a prime example of internet-fueled insanity. Why does deanonymization not help Facebook be a more positive place?

bandofthehawk• 8 months ago

Does that also apply to people living under oppressive governments? Anonymity can be a useful tool for sharing information that those in power don't want released, for example whistle blowing.

dartharva• 8 months ago

A woman wearing anything but a burqa in an extremist Islamic society would be popularly categorized as one of the "people with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies". So according to you liberal women in Iran, Pakistan, Sudan etc should not be given a safe space, is it?

elcapitan• 8 months ago

So that people with no shame, and with strong anti-social tendencies who are in power can come back at the de-anonymized people. Yeah, thanks.

stronglikedan3• 8 months ago

If anyone should be given a safe space, then everyone should be given a safe space.

anonbgone• 8 months ago

You said it brother!

We should make everyone who disagrees with baxuz where name tags on their chest in the real world too. So we can know who they are.

We can even put the names on a bright yellow six sided star. That way everyone can see them clearly.

hexator7• 8 months ago

"enforce a set of virtues" is a weird way of saying "enforcing basic decency". Let's be clear here, people who are rightfully banned are always going to complain. Our opinions as the majority who DO want decent conversations online are not irrelevant. We should not give those people equal weight to those facing actual censorship. Fragmenting the internet will never get rid of the problem that moderation needs to happen.

biophysboy6• 8 months ago

To be clear, if I were in charge, there would be significantly more banning and moderation on all platforms. I am arguing moderation is more politically feasible in small communities, not that is any more or less ethical.

nradov2• 8 months ago

What is basic decency? Is it indecent to advocate for atheism or if a women posts a picture of herself not wearing a burka? Many people in certain countries would say so. Personally I think those people are insane, and that maximal freedom of expression is the most important human right, but the fundamental problem is that there is no consensus on what constitutes basic decency.

nradov2• 8 months ago

A better solution to this would be to fragment within social media platforms. Allow users to post any content that's legal within their local jurisdiction. And give other users easy tools to create their own "filter bubbles" so that they don't see content which they personally consider insane or offensive. This would allow the social media platforms to sidestep political debates about censorship.

biophysboy6• 8 months ago

I have wondered if the long term trajectory of social media is as a locally governed utility, similar to energy or water. I would love a boring page landlocked to my neighborhood. Obviously there would the NextDoor "Karen" issue, that would need to be addressed somehow...

hedgeho• 8 months ago

Sounds like bluesky

Karrot_Kream2• 8 months ago

Then you get the other side of this problem, the echo chamber effect. If people self sort they'll eventually end up in social circles that are completely illegible from the realm of physical politics, which leads to a political instability of a different kind.

It's a hard problem. I think multi armed bandit based algorithms can help. Bluesky is a sort of "live" example of self filtering and it ends up creating a lot of fractional purity politics over which filter bubble is the just/moral filter bubble.

jjk166• 8 months ago

The real grift has been in echo chambers changing peoples vocabulary such that we can use the same words but talk right past eachother, allowing extremely moderate positions to be reframed as extreme and making what ought to be minor disagreements unresolvable. People making an "I can see both sides" argument are completely missing the point - the issue is that most people can't see both sides, and even when they go out of their way to look at the other side's argument, they come away even more convinced that the other side's argument is dumb because it is dumb, if it is assumed everyone is speaking the same language. People haven't all suddenly become insane, or dumb, or unreasonable; we've just taken for granted that people geographically close to us using the same vocabulary would mean the same things, and thus we never developed the skills to translate between people who are in fact living in wildly different worlds possibly in the same household. And much of this is by design - pointing out how dumb someone else is, and complaining about the burden of dealing with these dumb people, takes so much less effort than actually doing the work to build consensus and make changes.

stronglikedan3• 8 months ago

one of the first steps in any color revolution is changing the language to confuse everyone, so it's not surprising that it's so common

welcome_dragon2• 8 months ago

Exactly correct on echo chambers. I say my opinion on something and I hear the exact same responses from pro people and the exact same responses from con people. Everyone hears it.

Repeating the same words someone else does to make yourn point makes me think the other person isn't capable of considering they might be wrong.

I disagree with saying "I can see both sides". That's another echo chamber. If I say I can reasonably see both sides of an issue, one side calls me an idiot and uneducated and suc h and the other goes straw man and how I'm a communist and/or Hitler. No. I can see why side A thinks the way they do and side B thinks the way they do.

I'm not talking about hot topics either.

I'm really starting to just want to get away from all society and/or just never have more than surface level conversations with people.

disambiguation2• 8 months ago

The real grift has been in echo chambers changing peoples vocabulary

Glad others are noticing this, it deserves more attention than it gets and everyone should be aware it's happening.

mc33012• 8 months ago

I'm genuinely interested in some concrete examples of "changing peoples vocabulary."

I'm not really in the loop, and I think I do a decent job of avoiding echo chambers.

alextingle2• 8 months ago

Can you give an example or two of this conflicting vocabulary?

cheevly• 8 months ago

Cages. Evil. Literally. Extremism. Greedy. Exploited. Healthy. Offensive.

int_19h4• 8 months ago

I'm reminded of a certain philosopher...

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

maclombardi• 8 months ago

It's easier said than done. I simply observe everything and try not to react unless I absolutely need to.

This summer I started to write my thoughts an observations. Maybe you will find it helpful.

https://www.immaculateconstellation.info/the-middle-path-a-m...

photochemsyn• 8 months ago

The author might want to admit that 'moderate reasonable' positions are also branded and incentivized, and can lead to lucrative jobs in the corporate media and think tank worlds and even in the social media influencer space.

What really smells bad here is the 'stupid and insane' theme - everyone who disagrees with my moderate position is living in stupid-world or lacks sanity is itself an extremist fundamentalist position held by many so-called centrists and institutional bureaucrats whose impartiality is questionable as they are economic beneficiaries of the status quo.

Relatedly, extremist positions arise from extreme conditions - a well-paid experienced factory employee who loses their job due to the corporation outsourcing manufacturing to India will likely adopt an extreme position of opposition to shareholder or venture capital control of corporate decisions, and start advocating for worker control of corporations. Does that make them stupid and insane? Or is that just the spin the shareholders and venture capitalists are trying to put on their reasonable moderate position about sharing wealth and power in a more democratic fashion?

pksebben• 8 months ago

If all your relationships fail in the same manner, it is likely that the problem is you.

One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent. Another started treating political disagreement as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.

Manufactured consent is a real thing, with mounting evidence that it's becoming increasingly prevalent. The ownership structures around major news outlets are worrisome and what many considered 'reliable' for years are now showing seriously problematic habits (like genocide erasure - lookin' at you, NYT.)

Liberalism has come under completely valid scrutiny as we've seen fiscal policies implemented by Clinton and Obama blow up in our faces. No, we don't think Reaganomics is anything but a grift, but many of us see the grift in NAFTA and the ACA and Gramm-Leach-Bliley and have begun to question the honesty of centrist liberal economic policies because we are seeing them fail catastrophically.

The incentive gradient was clear: sanity was expensive, and extremism paid dividends.

Author is doing something subtle here - without making a defense or interrogation of the statement, they are saying "Not being liberal / centrist is extremism, and thus invalid". I call bullshit.

I have not profited or benefited from my "extreme" leftist views. If anything, I take a risk every time I talk about them out in the open. My comment history is going to be visible to all future employers. Should the government continue it's rightward slide I'll have a target painted on my back that I put there. I don't believe the things I believe because it's convenient, I believe them because in my estimation, we are operating on a set of failed systems and it's important that we fix them because they present a real and present danger.

We have Trump because Biden was utterly incapable of facing the actual problems people are having with the economic prosperity gap. If you don't address the actual hardship in people's lives, you leave the door open for a huckster to make those promises for you. Most will take the unreliable promise of a better tomorrow over being lied to about whether they even have a problem. You don't need a PhD in economics to know that whatever the GDP might be you're still broke and you can't afford to feed your kids.

spencerflem4• 8 months ago

Totally agreed with all points. Thanks for writing it up so elegantly

alksdjf892432• 8 months ago

Breaking people raises the GDP. It wasn't that Biden was incapable, I mean besides the dementia his party and the media hid from its viewers, he was capable of fixing the problem for the less than billionaires.

The problem is believing the other party has an alternative. The problem is belief in the other. Who we believe the other is.

The other isn't anyone who doesn't have power over you. The problem is believing people who say someone who doesn't have power over you is the other.

There is only the powerless and the powerful.

cjfd• 8 months ago

Nobody can vouch for their own sanity. Attempting to do so only make you sound insane. Incentives to be insane? Sure, but.... it is timing the stock market of ideas. Some will get rich but most will not. And sanity either has to return or insanity will destroy many lives and the society in which it is allowed free reign. In any case if you promoted insanity when sanity returns and people regain their ability to have a memory you may reap what you seeded.

johnisgood3• 8 months ago

Nobody can vouch for their own sanity. Attempting to do so only make you sound insane.

Exactly, and if people deem you to be insane, you cannot do anything about that. They will find reasons for why what you are saying is out of your insanity. There is a great movie about a woman being held against her own will at the locked up psychiatric ward and it explores this.

Bukhmanizer• 8 months ago

As a long time proponent of reasonable-ism I disagree with a lot of this. The assumption that a lot of our problems stem from 2 sides just seeing an issue differently is just nonsense in this day and age.

The big Problem, is that one side has slid heavily into authoritarianism, and the other side is completely ill-equipped to fight it.

On any particular issue, the right will say whatever gets them more Power, and the left will bring out some sort of philosophy professor to try and pick apart the nuances of the conversation.

spencerflem4• 8 months ago

For real. Honestly, the idea that all people are good and caring and just see things differently is the comforting lie.

I really really want to believe it. You get to feel happy about humanity, smarter than all the hysterical people, etc,

It took so so so much evil from the Republicans to convince me that they are Not a reasonable side, do Not warrant any consideration, and that people who follow them Are morally corrupt.

scuff3d• 8 months ago

I was thinking about this while reading the article. 15 years ago I prided myself on actively searching out opposing views and engaging with them. I still do that in the small scale, talking with coworkers or friends who have opposing views, but where the fuck can you find any reasonable conservative commentators these days. What are the most prominent voices? People like Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder? They don't have an intellectually honest bone in their body.

How the hell can you even get a balanced view in terms of news/media you consume when one side is dominated by lunatics and bad actors.

disgruntledphd2• 8 months ago

Oren Cass and Commonplace are pretty good writers on the US Republican side.

throwaway31131• 8 months ago

I'm not familiar with Ben Shapiro or Steven Crowder but what makes you so sure that their point of view is unreasonable? It seems you agree that their viewpoint is opposing, which likely means their premise are different, so isn't it entirely possible that their conclusion is reasonable and logical when one starts from their position?

Also, there isn't one source that can represent the "conservative" viewpoint because there isn't one conservative viewpoint. There are many factions within the Republican party with sometimes shockingly different points of view. Just like the Democratic party representing the "liberal" agenda.

I could just as easily ask, where is the one source I go to get an understanding of the liberal agenda? (Just a rhetorical question, I actually don't follow the news and don't plan to.)

immibis2• 8 months ago

At this point isn't the balanced view simply the non-conservative view?

Don't listen to Democrat party propaganda either of course, but there's much less of that and it's slightly more aligned with reality.

LorenPechtel2• 8 months ago

And you don't realize there are problems on both sides?

resonanormal• 8 months ago

We are at this point where we need to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” again. This mass media circus of social media and influencers doesn’t help anyone except their own self centred interests. Fair to say this is easier in Europe where we don’t have the propaganda firehose but I think it’s time to switch off US friends

robot-wrangler3• 8 months ago

There's some truth to this because "Culture is not your friend, man." Ironically though it really needs update, maybe more like turn off, tune out, rise up?

stronglikedan3• 8 months ago

this is easier in Europe where we don’t have the propaganda firehose

quite ironic, given that we're talking about cognitive dissonance amongst other things

alksdjf892432• 8 months ago

The article is an indictment on hackernews itself. I'm sure that won't be well received here, because of what the article says, specifically: "Start by diversifying your information diet in ways that feel actively uncomfortable."

There is almost no diversity of thought here, simply due to the algorithm. The basis of acceptance is agreeing with the main ideology here.

When the algorithm of the platform is to banish those who disagree, tribal unity is the outcome.

The algorithm doesn't allow disagreement. The algorithm is wrong and part of the algorithm is to disallow commenting on the algorithm.

jrochkind1• 8 months ago

This comments section is so full of examples illustrating what the OP is critiquing that it's depressing.

cs702• 8 months ago

More succinctly:

The Nash equilibrium of public discourse on social media is extremism and polarization ...

... because for each individual, the way to get more clicks and influence is by becoming more extreme and polarizing.

Sigh.

spencerflem4• 8 months ago

Idk, I’m a big critic of social media (don’t use any but hacker news). Really do think it has lots and lots of problems.

But what’s polarized me isnt that. It’s just reading regular news and caring about the world.

robot-wrangler3• 8 months ago

Exactly, so about that, there's good news and bad news. Epistemic and mean field game theory is eventually going to be well understood stuff and define better alternatives very, very specifically. After we understand our past completely AND can predict our future, we'll know exactly what to fix and how, but unfortunately nothing whatsoever will change anyway. Probably someone will weaponize it to actually make things worse! Cold comfort to be sure, but I personally will still sleep easier after I know exactly why we are doomed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5U1-OmAICpU

avhception• 8 months ago

Trying to talk reason to multiple sides makes you an outcast.

welcome_dragon2• 8 months ago

Lol case in point: me trying to have a reasonable discussion about property taxes going up 66% in one year.

I thought people might argue that this could put an unfair burden on poor families or fixed income families, or maybe some reason to justify or not.

Nope. Lots of name calling, trying to dox me, ad hominem attacks on everyone from multiple sides.

I'm convinced that anonymity (or, more correctly, perceived anonymity) makes some people act in ways they never would face to face.

Eh this probably makes me a "Boomer" but I've seen it for years. Basically everyone's a troll now.

johnisgood3• 8 months ago

I am 31 years old. Same experiences. You have to find the right audience. For me, it was particular IRC channels where they were still quite reasonable.

VintageRobot3• 8 months ago

The friend who saw conspiracies everywhere built a following. Then an audience. Then a 7-figure income stream.

That person is almost certainly a grifter. If I was dishonest enough to do it, I would to.

It isn't that difficult if you are reasonably articulate, look reasonably tidy and can upload a 20 minute video once day to get an audience. A lot of these people are simply choosing a "side" and then repeating the talking points.

There are people that make 10-20k a month just reading the news and many of them aren't even good at doing that.

ekjhgkejhgk2• 8 months ago

One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent. Another started treating political disagreement as evidence of moral corruption. A third began using the word "liberal" as if it was a personality disorder rather than loose coalitions of sometimes contradictory beliefs.

Uh.... The vast majority of new stories from major outlets ARE manufactured consent.

uniq72• 8 months ago

What does "manufactured consent" mean?

I thought consent is a synonym of agreement or willingness. If so, what do they mean with "manufactured agreement" exactly?

I don't live in USA and English is not my mother language, so maybe I'm missing some alternative urban definition for this expression?

ekjhgkejhgk2• 8 months ago

I understand what you're saying. But people who use the expression "manufactured consent" know that it comes from Chomsky and use it in the same sense as Chomsky did. It refers to the idea that the only debate that the media allows is that which doesn't challenge any actual power. Furthermore that expression also refers to the fact that this is achieved without anyone having to explicitly coerse the media. The individuals in it self-select to support with the agenda. You're allowed to be a revolutionary, but no one in the media will give you a job because they're all benefiting from the status quo and don't want to rock and boat.

For example, the left media hypes the democrats and the right media hypes the republicans. You're encouraged to debate which is better, because it doesn't actually change anything. But if there's a candidate that says "corporations have too much power and are using to exploit labour", both sides of the media will attack them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

giva2• 8 months ago

You get certainty in an uncertain world. You get a community that will defend you. You get a simple heuristic for navigating complex issues.

This is what faith used to provide. I say this as a not religious person: Maybe societies really need something like religion to channel irrationality?

danielbln• 8 months ago

We've been trying religion for as long there have been humans. Tends to suffer from the same shortcomings: very easy to subvert and abuse by adversial agents (grifters, sociopaths, etc) and increases in-group/out-group thinking.

We need something new.

giva2• 8 months ago

But the point is, that's the same happening right now without religion. At least, with organized religion, you have someone accountable.

Again, this come from someone without a religious affiliation.

eboynyc32• 8 months ago

Who is the arbitrator of what’s right?

BrenBarn2• 8 months ago

This article is advice for individuals on how to resist the societal incentives to embrace insanity. But what I'm really interested in is advice for how to fix our society so it doesn't incentivize insanity.

conqrr• 8 months ago

Reminds me of seatbelts on airplane, put them first before trying to help others.

johnisgood3• 8 months ago

How do you help others if you physically restrain yourself from doing so though? I can imagine some help but it severely limits the help you can provide and needed, depending on the situation.

throwawayqqq11• 8 months ago

Scepticism taught in schools. Demonstrate manipulation on kids and conclude that even educated, intelligent minds can get entangled when they let their guard down.

We talk a lot about polarization as if it were a disease that infected society, but we’re missing a key data point: polarization is a growth hack, and it works.

Unfortunately the article does not explain how it works and without a problem definition, you cant reach a solution. IMO it certainly behaves like a disease.

I consider identity politics as one vector how a mind virus can take over the hosts higher order reasoning. There are certainly other vectors (cognitive biases) but IP is definetly the biggest driving factor behind todays polarization. Calling others "liberals" is primarily a signal to label an outgroup.

On what political side do you see more symbols like flags, stickers, memes, etc? Entire news cycle narratives can get deprived of meaning and act as the most recent symbol, individuals can use to signal their group membership. Any counter argument against such a holy cow gets viciously attacked or ignored because to some degree, this counter argument is an actual attack on yourself, your identitiy. Admitting errors is no big deal when nothing is at stake. The opposite example would be a very religious person loosing faith with an adrenaline rush (sweat, shiver, high heart rate, flat respiration), when the body prepares a fight or flight response because a strong, non-ignorable and contradicting thought crossed its mind.

And on what political side do you see more intelligence and broader empathy? More cognitive flexibility?

Around 2000, the internet was considered a new "printing press 2.0" for making information widely accessible. This analogy fits very well, because the first ever western book to be printed was the f'ing bible.

grodes3• 8 months ago

[flagged]

o11c3• 8 months ago

Note that "feeds" is a confusing word choice; I immediately thought of something RSS-like which often links to long-form content.

For news, my rule is to check major headlines at most once a day (often less in practice), so I am at least vaguely aware what people are talking about. Doing it this way makes it clear how ... banal? ... most clickbait is. Something local might be useful; if they mention something national it's probably actually semi-important. Though, if you can't change anything about it, is it really?

If reading the Bible, I strongly suggest starting with Matthew 5 and continuing from there, not too fast (maybe one chapter per week, so you can stop and think about it). This gets straight to the mindset, as opposed to the handful of protrusions that make it to the pop-culture version. [I have a lot more I could say about how to read the Bible, but it's no use posting it again unless someone is interested.]

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%205&ver...

taejavu2• 8 months ago

Consider me interested

grodes3• 8 months ago

Personally, I really like Luke because of how clearly it is structured.

appguy• 8 months ago

There’s plenty of wisdom in the Bible. The book of Proverbs resonates with me the most.

mc33012• 8 months ago

I would replace your number 5 with "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" or "MacBeth" or "Calvin & Hobbes" or maybe even Natsume's "I am a Cat." Also fun fictional books with impressive protagonists.

Other than that, your first four points are wonderful.

Y_Y• 8 months ago

Strongly agreed. Reading the actual bible is (mostly) boring as sin. There are a couple of gems in there that you can just take on their own though.

My personal favourite is Ecclesiastes which, apart from a couple of lines of slop added by a later author, has little to do with Abrahamic religion and is more just a little nugget of proto-existentialism.

   “Meaningless! Meaningless!”
      says the Teacher.
  “Utterly meaningless!
      Everything is meaningless.”

  What do people gain from all their labors
      at which they toil under the sun?
 
  Generations come and generations go,
      but the earth remains forever.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ecclesiastes%20...

WorldMaker2• 8 months ago

As an atheist, I do find some use for the Jefferson Bible. (US Founding Father) Thomas Jefferson collected all the best parts of the Gospels, dropped the miracles, some of the stranger allegories, but kept all the sermons (the things Jesus was said to have directly taught). It's about 14 "letter" pages, so almost "pamphlet" sized. As far as I'm concerned it finds most of the baby in the bathwater (IMO, so much bathwater), is an easy read, and says some things much more succinctly that I think a lot of Christians might be surprised to find are core teachings of Jesus in the Bible.

I sometimes wonder what the country would be like if every hotel desk was more likely to have a copy of the Jefferson Bible than the Gideon Bible.

kalaksi• 8 months ago

Algorithms that are profit-motivated (trying hard to get you hooked) also reward "engaging" content which means clickbait, ragebait and content that often triggers some emotions and is easy to consume. So not the most balanced content.

inatreecrown22• 8 months ago

how can you comment on hacker news that you don't consume news?

jonasdegendt• 8 months ago

I'd argue it's mostly trade news here, I'd assume the OP means commercial broadcasting, newspaper websites and the likes.

Very different for your psyche in my experience.

astura2• 8 months ago

Or social media, at that.

Let me leave a comment on hacker news (both news and social media) that I don't consume news or social media.

ramon156• 8 months ago

Would assume its more about pop culture news

pjc50• 8 months ago

Going well until (5) .. beyond the basic textual questions (old or new Testament? Which translation? Apocrypha or not?), you then have to confront the relationship of the actually existing churches to the text.

MrVandemar2• 8 months ago

5. Read the Bible. Even if you do not believe, Jesus is the most impressive human I've ever learned about. When I started reading it I was agnostic.

Yeah, read the whole Bible — the one people swear on in court, the one the preachers hold and up and tell you it is the word of god — and don't cherry-pick. So much misogeny and shit behavior. How about this one:

“David and his men went out and killed two hundred Philistines. He brought their foreskins and presented them as payment in full to become the king's son-in-law. Then Saul gave his daughter Michal to David in marriage.”

Yeah, let's kill those Philistines! Yeah, two hundred human beings! And let's cut off their foreskins because that's not remotely sick and dysfunctional at all and make a gift of them. Seems to be behavior that was rewarded.

Word of the Lord is basically sick fucking shit.

gizajob2• 8 months ago

Because its entirely man made

grodes3• 8 months ago

It a description of what happened.

sph• 8 months ago

5. If you don't care about the Bible, I strongly recommend the Tao Te Ching. Probably the most succinct, KISS philosophy and spirituality book ever written in the history of mankind.

To misquote Alan Watts, all other religions are for people that need the Tao explained with too many words.

My favourite version to start with, and even more succinct than the original, is Ron Hogan's https://terebess.hu/english/tao/ron.html then you can move on to fancier translations.

gizajob2• 8 months ago

Second this comment. The Tao Te Ching is about as close to a “right answer” in metaphysics as we’re likely to get.

Even after going around the houses for 2500 years, eventually philosophy reached Wittgenstein who had to hold his hands up and say “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” which is pretty well a summary of what Lao Tzu was pointing at.

dominicrose• 8 months ago

So you're suggesting an Eastern philosophy and spirituality instead of a Western one. I've listened to both Jordan Peterson and Eckhart Tolle, the difference is quite big but both points of view are interesting.

chimpanzee• 8 months ago

I highly recommend Ursula Le Guin's translation.

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/lao-tzu-the-tao-te-ching

XorNot• 8 months ago

What is it with HackerNews constantly recommending religion to people as some cure-all?

Balgair• 8 months ago

Anecdata:

I've never seen so many Christmas lights go up this early in my little neck of the wood

They started doing heavy Black Friday sales ads almost immediately after Halloween this year, more so than I remember from even covid (but that's just my memory)

The Christmas radio station started a full 3 weeks early this year. Typically it's after 6pm on Thanksgiving day that they start.

Overall, people are worried right now. Religion slots right in there too.

The Bible is meant to conflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, as the saying goes.

godsinhisheaven2• 8 months ago

Great advice there, and I must especially echo bullet 5 here, read the Bible. One point of disagreement though: I don't believe Jesus left us the option of believeing he was just a good moral teacher. (Liar, Lunatic, Lord)

godsinhisheaven2• 8 months ago

Shoot I don't think I can edit my reply via this app, but I think the misinterpreted the comment I was replying to. Apologies. Anyways read the Bible

e40• 8 months ago

I think you could replace 5 with the golden rule.

bashmelek• 8 months ago

I like the Bible too. It is unfortunate but not unexpected that it set off such a firestorm in the replies.

I would even go so far to say that even nonbelievers would find much value in it, just reading at least the top stories and passages the Old and New Testaments. These are foundational cultural texts that bridge centuries of peoples. And if you are a nonbeliever who wants to read beyond the popular well known parts, please do! But read with a mind to connect with others, not divide.

There are other good things to read too. Plato, Shakespeare, the Chinese Classics, Greek Mythology, folktales. Things that people share with those around them as well as their ancestors

lenkite• 8 months ago

One friend became “convinced” that every major news story was manufactured consent

There is nothing stupid about this and it is a massive problem with Western news. Different anchors across different networks presenting news with the same words as if they were handed off the exact same script to read out, to emphasize the same talking points, etc. They make AI slop look so good. I fully stopped watching US News a few years ago.

RunSet• 8 months ago

Read the Bible. Even if you do not believe, Jesus is the most impressive human I've ever learned about.

You might also find it edifying to learn about Socrates. His trial and punishment are as compelling as Jesus' and I his existence is more likely to be an historic fact.

thefaux• 8 months ago

Yes, they are similar and in both cases what we know about them was passed down by their unreliable students with an agenda. I have studied both over the past few years and I find myself disagreeing with Plato's Socrates often whereas I find the Jesus of the Gospels much harder to argue against.

svieira• 8 months ago

I think that Plato's dialogs are well worth reading too.

Also, just so you know, Jesus is as or more historically "likely to be real" than Socrates (three major works written by two people who knew Him, multitudes more written by those who knew those who knew Him, mentions by multiple historians of the period, a thriving cult in spite of vicious persecutions, etc.). Socrates has three contemporaries (Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes) and then the writings of Plato project him beyond his time and into the philosophical context.

But perhaps you mean "the Jesus of the Gospels" as opposed to "Yeshua ben Yoseph min Natzret" when you said "historic" here (there's good arguments for Jesus-of-the-Gospels being Yeshua ben Yoseph too, but one thing at a time).

eightysixfour• 8 months ago

Social media + recommendation algorithms = echo chambers.

In actual tests, non-algorithmic feeds become similarly extremist: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/08/study-social-media-p...

dakotasmith• 8 months ago

Re: 5

The Jefferson Bible [1] is excellent in this regard. He removes all miracles and most mentions if the supernatural in a cut & paste job of a King James version of the Bible. The result is portraying Jesus as a person, not divine.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Bible

WorldMaker2• 8 months ago

Thomas Jefferson knew Greek and Latin (was a "polymath" of the old Enlightenment era sort) and used somewhat more original sources than King James, translating them himself into English. He probably did cross-check the King James Edition for some of the English wording, or at least couldn't entirely escape its orbit/gravitational pull, but it is mostly true the Jefferson Bible was a fresh early-American translation.

coffeefirst• 8 months ago

Let me insert one more: you have to spend some time with your own thoughts.

Whatever you read, whatever you listen to, if you do not actually stop to consider it, by taking a long walk without headphones or scribbling in a notebook perhaps, you can’t know what you think.

And I suspect this is what’s happening to a lot of people. It’s easy to perform a psychological DDOS on yourself with doomscrolling or YouTube or podcasts or cable news in a way that’s actually really hard to do with a 500 page book.

didgetmaster• 8 months ago

When I go to the polling place to cast my vote for the candidate of my choice; I am often holding my nose and voting for the one who I think will do the least damage. I often wonder why sane, rational problem solvers are not on the ballot.

Then I realize that our system often rewards the attention seekers rather than pragmatic leaders. Those who quietly get the work done are not invited on talk shows or podcasts. The don't have rallies and make the evening news.

All the oxygen in the room is sucked in by the performance artists, who often say outlandish things but rarely get anything productive done.

int_19h4• 8 months ago

This is true outside politics, as well. Or rather, more precisely, any organization has some amount of internal politics, and the larger and more bureaucratic it is, the more politics dominates over utilitarianism. Nation-states and their governments are on the far end of that spectrum, obviously, but it also applies equally to large corporations etc.

And the thing about it is that it doesn't just reward attention seeking. It rewards the entire spectrum of sociopathic behavior - making promises you don't intend to keep, picking associated based on loyalty rather than merit, walking on people's heads if that's what it takes to get higher etc. It's a system that positively selects for sociopathy in elites, whether they are politicians or CEOs.

And thus that is what we get. People like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are extreme examples of what such selection can produce, but I don't think it's a qualitative change compared to the "good old times"; rather, it's the logical end result of the gradual evolution.

BLKNSLVR3• 8 months ago

We need 'unfluencers'.

The problem is that it would just be the same few message repeated ad nauseum:

- Treat it all like it's trying to sell you something

- Think for yourself

- Nothing is as simple as it seems

- One person does not represent an entire race/country/group (ie. anecdata is not truth)

etc.

As they say, however, a lie can travel the world twice before the truth has tied its shoe laces.

wslh2• 8 months ago

There is a critical problem with influencers: once they build a large audience, they often feel compelled to stick to the same message, even if they later realize it's wrong, because influence itself becomes a business and a source of power.

BLKNSLVR3• 8 months ago

I think Unfluencers can be consistent because they're not taking a position.

But that also means it's unprofitable, so why do it?

Which, in itself, is an interesting commentary on Influencers.

Havoc• 8 months ago

Really should have mentioned algorithmic feeds too. They’re imo one of the biggest contributors to this.

Diversify your sources is a good start but without algos are a gravity well of sorts too - it pulls you into echo chambers - that are stronger than manual attempts to select diversity

eisbaw• 8 months ago

You get certainty in an uncertain world. You get a community that will defend you. You get a simple heuristic for navigating complex issues.

Like religion

wslh2• 8 months ago

Religion artifacts exists in part for organizing communities. For example, The Ten Commandments were revolutionary and short.

int_19h4• 8 months ago

Too short, clearly, given that a large patch was issued almost immediately.

refurb• 8 months ago

The irony of an article that talks about beliefs being fed by internet content, then suggests using internet content to address it.

Turtles all the way down.

d4rkn0d3z• 8 months ago

Here is a program for avoiding insanity:

1) Always listen to your rational adversary, repeat their arguments back to them to their satisfaction rather than in caricature.

2) List facts; states of affairs that are not in dispute. Adduce no fact in isolation.

3) Form the strongest version of your rational counterparts' argument.

4) Apply reason faithfully to analyze.

5) Lather rinse repeat.

It seems the above is the best humans have every been able to do, it is child's play that we somehow forgot, maybe because we labelled it as something obscure like "the scientific method" or "legal process". I think this is as simple as "follow your nose".

andyferris• 8 months ago

This is a very interesting article.

I'm not 100% convinced every influencer _feels_ trapped in a world of their own making - but it's correct that truth this day is suffering a bit of a "tragedy of the commons" problem.

The world will keep offering you bad trades, will keep rewarding positions you know are too simple to be true.

Here's a story. I'd guess there's at least a few HN folk with a similar tale.

I'm not a real believer in cryptocurrency, in its current popular form at least. Actual value would be delivered by fast transaction rates at (very) high speed, high assurance, and some kind of oversight or ability to reverse transactions (you can choose your cutoff anywhere from "convicted criminal behavior" to "I disputed a transaction on my Visa/Mastercard just because I could" but ultimately society and the law needs to be an effective backstop of the system). Yet I was introduced to the bitcoin paper sometime near its release by a PhD officemate, and was a specialist in high performance and GPU computing at the time, and resolved to go home and spend a few hours mining a coin, but instead I just chilled out when I got home. I could literally have hundreds of coins right now (or equivalent cash). For years I could have chosen to join the bandwagen, but resolved not to. Currently my parents are profiting - go figure.

So yeah the world offers some interesting trades from time to time!

In any case I found the article meaningful. I'm glad I live outside the US and its current polarization, but I feel we have the same problem growing here. Hopefully we all learn to deal with it and sort out our differences.

abixb• 8 months ago

Switching a Japanese dumbphone (Kyocera) was the best thing I ever did. Eliminating your smartphone (as inconvenient and life altering as it may be -- you'll need to figure out a path) is probably the single most effective thing you can do to get into the top 1-10%... of people with properly functioning cognition.

acqbu• 8 months ago

No VPN allowed, why?

johnsmith1840• 8 months ago

I view social media through this lens now.

https://youtu.be/fuFlMtZmvY0?si=Jwtky2w0j41u4zLP

It's less that we are in echo chambers and more of being completly flooded with too many opinions.

Avacados == liberal Steaks == conservative

The point I take is that the only way to prevent this is decrease the amount of information you recieve not increase. If you constantly read extreme opinions everywhere your brain cannot process it and therefore starts dropping everything into really big buckets. The more sides you read the bigger your buckets becomes.

Sure you're less informed but I don't think humans were designed to grok the entire world's information either.

mediumsmart• 8 months ago

Arno Gruen the insanity of normality

PeterStuer• 8 months ago

"Remember: the world only rewards insanity because we're measuring the wrong timeframe."

Unfortunatly for many, HR lives in that "wrong timeframe", so you keep your more sane opinions bottled up.

nobodywillobsrv• 8 months ago

The piece denies the existence of problems though.

It starts of with enragment and denailism.

The piece is the polarization.

"Diversify your information" in no way cancels single events and single counter examples.

The idea that ingesting more diversified information will bring back the lives of dead children and delete what people have done and said is ludicrous.

The problem is that a certain kind of "intellectual" does not understand how constantly pivoting or turning to statistical aggregates to avoid the discussion around a single intervention is basically a vector of attack on a system.

To stay sane, one must parse data. Literally attempt to gather data from the government. Literally take notes tracking the incoherence of the media narratives. But then you will find that merely describing reality is enough to trigger certain types of people now into frothing mania.

If you think you are intelligent you MUST realize that social media is going to do importance sampling on the things they find usefull to the business.

The defense against importance sampling is to abandon experiential aggregates entirely and focus on factless truths like incoherent, or single examplars that are enough to prove your point or raise a grievance.

Focus on counter-examples. Focus on definitti style incoherence. Live in the meta.

badenglish• 8 months ago

The sheep-people were suddenly given freedom of choice, and they immediately rushed to choose their own shepherd. This is where the enormous amount of trust in cheaftans, national leaders, and other autocrats came from. This explains the outbreak of fascism and the cult of force.

Previously, parasites on society had to compete for resources among themselves. Now they can draw them directly. In other words, the existing system of "checks and balances" has collapsed, and there is no new one yet.

firmretention• 8 months ago

I'm so sick and tired of reading AI slop.

How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity

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